CONTENTS
TRANSLATOR'S NOTE
CHAPTER I. THE HARMAS
CHAPTER II. THE ANTHRAX
CHAPTER III. ANOTHER PROBER (PERFORATOR)
CHAPTER IV. LARVAL DIMORPHISM
CHAPTER V. HEREDITY
CHAPTER VI. MY SCHOOLING
CHAPTER VII. THE POND
CHAPTER VIII. THE CADDIS WORM
CHAPTER IX. THE GREENBOTTLES
CHAPTER X. THE GREY FLESH FLIES
CHAPTER XI. THE BUMBLEBEE FLY
CHAPTER XII. MATHEMATICAL MEMORIES: NEWTON'S BINOMIAL THEOREM
CHAPTER XIII. MATHEMATICAL MEMORIES: MY LITTLE TABLE
CHAPTER XIV. THE BLUEBOTTLE: THE LAYING
CHAPTER XV. THE BLUEBOTTLE: THE GRUB
CHAPTER XVI. A PARASITE OF THE MAGGOT
CHAPTER XVII. RECOLLECTIONS OF CHILDHOOD
CHAPTER XVIII. INSECTS AND MUSHROOMS
CHAPTER XIX. A MEMORABLE LESSON
CHAPTER XX. INDUSTRIAL CHEMISTRY
The present volume contains all the essays on flies, or Diptera, from the Souvenirs entomologiques, to which I have added, in order to make the dimensions uniform with those of the other volumes of the series, the purely autobiographical essays comprised in the Souvenirs. These essays, though they have no bearing upon the life of the fly, are among the most interesting that Henri Fabre has written and will, I am persuaded, make a special appeal to the reader. The chapter entitled The Caddis Worm has been included as following directly upon The Pond.
Since publishing The Life of the Spider, I was much struck by a passage in Dr. Chalmers Mitchell's stimulating work, The Childhood of Animals, in which the secretary of the Zoological Society of London says: 'I have attempted to avoid the use of terms familiar only to students of zoology and to refrain from anatomical detail, but at the same time to refrain from the irritating habit assuming that my readers have no knowledge, no dictionaries and no other books.'
I began to