Note 1 — AUTHOR’S PREFACE

A few years later, having secured my doctor’s degree, I was teaching philosophy, not in the University, but in the Grand Seminaire1 of Lyons. The problem of instinct, which enters into the province of psychology, led me to consult the works of J. H. Fabre, which were recommended to me by the professor of Science. My worthy colleague regarded the author of the Souvenirs Entomologiques with a sort of worship, and it was with positive delight that he used to read aloud to me the finest passages of those masterly “Essays upon the Instincts and Habits of Insects.”