Note 5 — Chapter XIX · FABRE’S WRITINGS

We are, indeed, glad to think that if he was unduly overlooked at a later time, he was at least known and admired at an early period in Aveyron, and that as early as 1866 his class books were especially recommended to the attention of our young schoolmasters at the Normal College of Rodez. They could have had none better conceived or compiled. Would to heaven our public schoolmasters had always been as happily inspired or as well advised in the choice of their textbooks! Would to heaven that, instead of the dismal and misleading suggestions of materialism and impiety, there were still a place in the manuals of science, put in the hands of our children, for reflections as sane and as lofty as these. “By their practical side the sciences verge upon agriculture, medicine, and industry; but they have before all a moral advantage which is not shared in the same degree by any other branch of human knowledge: in that by giving us a knowledge of the created universe they uplift the soul and nourish the mind with noble and salutary thoughts.”5