Note 6 — Chapter XIX · FABRE’S WRITINGS

The study of the heavenly bodies in particular has this inestimable result: “The things that we are told by stellar astronomy overwhelm the understanding and leave no room in our minds except for an impulse of religious wonder at the author of these marvels, the God whose unlimited power has peopled the abysses of space with immeasurable heaps of suns.”6 But the divine work “perhaps appears more marvellous still in the infinity of littleness than in the infinity of magnitude: Magnus in magnis, it has been said of God, maximus in minimis.”7 This fine saying is verified and more or less explicitly confirmed in a thousand passages of the Souvenirs.