



Produced by Chris Curnow, Jennifer Linklater and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive)






INSECT ADVENTURES

Petty truths, I shall be told, those presented by the habits of a
spider or a grasshopper. There are no petty truths today; there is but
one truth, whose looking-glass to our uncertain eyes seems broken,
though its every fragment, whether reflecting the evolution of a planet
or the flight of a bee, contains the supreme law.

                                                     MAURICE MAETERLINCK

[Illustration: "What a day it was when I first became a herdsman of
ducks!"]




  INSECT ADVENTURES

  BY
  J. HENRI FABRE

  _Selections from Alexander Teixeira de Mattos'
  Translation of Fabre's "Souvenirs Entomologiques"_

  RETOLD FOR YOUNG PEOPLE
  BY
  LOUISE SEYMOUR HASBROUCK

  ILLUSTRATED BY
  ELIAS GOLDBERG

  [Colophon]

  NEW YORK
  DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
  1917

  COPYRIGHT, 1917,
  By DODD, MEAD & COMPANY, Inc.




PREFACE


Jean Henri Fabre, author of the long series of "Souvenirs
Entomologiques" from which these studies are taken, was a French
school-teacher and scientist whose peculiar gift for the observation
and description of insect life won for him the title of the "insects'
Homer." A distinguished English critic says of him, "Fabre is the
wisest man, and the best read in the book of nature, of whom the
centuries have left us any record." The fact that he was mainly
self-taught, and that his life was