Bernard; and of this king of physiology, who commenced by proving himself
in works of pure imagination, and whose genius finally took for its theme
the manifold variations of living flesh, of him too may we not say that he
has explored the labyrinths of life with "the torch of poetry in his hand"?

Similarly, do not the harmonious sequences which run through all the
admirable discoveries of Pasteur give us the sensation of a veritable and
gigantic poem?

In Fabre also it seems that the passion which he brings to all his patient
observations is in itself truly creative: "his heart beats with emotion,
the sweat drips from his brow to the soil, making mortar of the dust"; he
forgets food and drink, and "thus passes hours of oblivion in the happiness
of learning." I have seen him in his laboratory studying the spawning of
the bluebottle, when I, at his side, could scarcely support the horrible
stench which rose from the putrefying adders and lumps of meat; he,
however, was oblivious of the frightful odour, and his face was inundated
with smiles of delight.

Intelligence, then, must here be the servant of feeling and intuition; a
kind of primitive faculty, mysterious and instinctive, which alone makes a
great naturalist like Fabre, a great historian like Michelet, a great
physician like Boherhaave or Bretonneau.

These last are not always the most scholarly nor the most learned nor the
most patient, but they are those who possess in a high degree that special
vision, that gift, properly speaking poetic, which is known as the clinical
eye, which at the first glance perceives and confirms the diagnosis in all
its detail.