rdon me.

Others again have reproached me with my style, which has not the
solemnity, nay, better, the dryness of the schools. They fear lest a
page that is read without fatigue should not always be the expression
of the truth. Were I to take their word for it, we are profound only
on condition of being obscure. Come here, one and all of you--you, the
sting bearers, and you, the wing-cased armor-clads--take up my defense
and bear witness in my favor. Tell of the intimate terms on which I live
with you, of the patience with which I observe you, of the care 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
whoever 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 labor
in a torture chamber and dissecting room, I make my observations under
the blue sky to the song of the cicadas, 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], to an untilled,
pebbly expanse abandoned to the vegetation of the thyme. It is too poor
to repay the work of the plow; but the shee