Note 16 — Chapter XIX · FABRE’S WRITINGS

To practise it more readily, he needs the insect close within his reach; more than that, he needs it under his hand, at his discretion, so to say. Neither the great museum of the fields nor the place of observation where the insects “roam at will amid the thyme and lavender” quite answers the requirements of this part of his programme. So at various points of the harmas all those appliances which we have already described were set up, “rustic achievements, clumsy combinations of trivial things.” In addition to these appliances in the open air, there are those inside the house: some are installed in the study, so that the experimenter “can see his insects working on the very table upon which he is writing their history”;16 others are arranged in a separate room known as the “animal laboratory.”