e with which I
record your actions. Your evidence is unanimous: yes, my pages, though
they bristle not with hollow formulas nor learned smatterings, are the
exact narrative of facts observed, neither more nor less; and whoso
cares to question you in his turn will obtain the same replies.

And then, my dear insects, if you cannot convince those good people,
because you do not carry the weight of tedium, I, in my turn, will say
to them:

"You rip up the animal and I study it alive; you turn it into an object
of horror and pity, whereas I cause it to be loved; you labour in a
torture-chamber and dissecting-room, I make my observations under the
blue sky, to the song of the Cicadae (The Cicada Cigale, an insect akin
to the Grasshopper and found more particularly in the south of
France.--Translator's Note.); you subject cell and protoplasm to
chemical tests, I study instinct in its loftiest manifestations; you
pry into death, I pry into life. And why should I not complete my
thought: the boars have muddied the clear stream; natural history,
youth's glorious study, has, by dint of cellular improvements, become a
hateful and repulsive thing. Well, if I write for men of learning, for
philosophers, who, one day, will try to some extent to unravel the
tough problem of instinct, I write also, I write above all things, for
the young, I want to make them love the natural history which you make
them hate; and that is why, while keeping strictly to the domain of
truth, I avoid your scientific prose, which too often, alas, seems
borrowed from some Iroquois idiom!"

But this is not my business for the moment: I want to speak of the bit
of land long cherished in my plans to form a laboratory of living
entomology, the bit of land which I have at last obtained in the
solitude of a little village. It is a "harmas," the name given, in this
district (The country round Serignan, in Provence.--Translator's
Note.), to an untilled, pebbly expanse abandoned to the vegetation of
the thyme. It is too poor to repay the work of the plough; but the
Sheep passes there in spring, when it has chanced to rain and a little
grass shoots up.

My harmas, however, because of its modicum of red earth swamped by a
huge mass of stones, has received a rough first attempt at cultivation:
I am told that vines once grew here. And, in fact, when we dig the
ground before planting a few trees, we turn up, here and there, remains
of the precious stock, half carbonize