Introduction by Jean-Henri Fabre
Introduction

Chapter 1: Nature's Intuition
Chapter 2 Elementary School Teacher
Chapter 3 Corsica
Chapter 4 In Avignon
Chapter 5: The Great Teacher
Chapter 6 Hideout
Chapter 7: Interpreting Nature
Chapter 8: The Miracle of Instinct
Chapter 9 Evolution or “Biological Variation”
Chapter 10: The Mind of Animals
Chapter 11 Harmony and Disharmony
Chapter 12: Understanding Nature
Chapter 13: The Epic of Animal Life
Chapter 14 Parallel Universes
Chapter 15: The Last Years in Serignan
Chapter 16: Twilight

Americas
Jean Henri Fabre's Chronology
Appendix Source

1.
The only book that allows you to understand Fabre's spirit accurately and richly.
─ A vivid portrayal of Fabre's life and work, which are like a 'scripture of nature.'
─ The life of a scientist who shone with his own light for a long time.

About 110 years have passed since Fabre passed away.
The fact that even after so long, this book has been published in South Korea, and that many people still praise Fabre, shows that his spirit and achievements are still alive and well.
Fabre, who was always cautious about talking about his life even while he was alive due to his taciturn yet stubborn personality, kept silent about rumors for a long time.
In the summer of 1907, the author of this book, Georges Victor Le Gros, who visited Fabre's home and laboratory, 'Armas', with his wife and became his disciple, felt the need to correct the public's misunderstandings about Fabre and began working on this book.
He made generous use of Fabre's manuscripts and correspondence, as well as all the family records provided by his brother, Frédéric Fabre.
Thanks to this, this book has been cited as a major reference work on Fabre both domestically and internationally even after his death.

Every sentence in the book was personally reviewed by Fabre, and the preface he wrote himself reveals the truth of this story.
Fabre, who spent most of his life uncovering the wonders of life, lived a life different from that of the scientists we are familiar with.
Rather than developing theories while enjoying the authority and fame of academia, he devoted his life to educating his students and conducting his own independent research together with them.
He wandered through the fields and mountains, experiencing nature with his whole body, and did not easily react to the voices of others who talked about him.
The fact that Fabre's conclusions, based solely on his own observations and experiences and based solely on evidence, were actually close to the truth, gives us a sense of his remarkable insight.

In this book, we hear the most profound and vivid story about Fabre, who was extremely cautious about appearing in front of others, as well as stories about animals, plants, and nature that were decisive moments in his life.
Thanks to the faithful quotation of key parts of Fabre's work, we can also get a glimpse of his beautiful sentences.
The life of Jean-Henri Fabre, loved across time, space, and age, still inspires us.
His attitude of observing life, which he cannot understand, with awe and tenacity, without making hasty judgments, and his way of living uprightly under the values ​​given by nature rather than by fame and power, not only evokes his achievements as a natural scientist, but also his respect as a human being.


Therefore, not a single line of the reviews in this book was written without Fabre's consent, and most of them can be seen as directly reflecting Fabre's spirit.
I tried to let Fabre speak as much as possible.
Didn't Fabre already depict "the life of a solitary student" in several chapters of "Fabre's Insect Book," which chronicles the birth of the naturalist and the development of his own ideas? For the most part, I've only introduced the essential details needed to complete the series of events.
It would be pointless to repeat in the same terms what can be found elsewhere, or to repeat in different or less satisfactory terms what Fabre himself frequently said.
So I put more effort into filling in the gaps he left behind, by listening to Fabre, appealing to his memory, questioning his contemporaries, and occasionally retracing the footsteps of his disciples.

─ From the “Introductory Remarks”

2.
The first observer to see nature differently
─ The science of situations and contexts that go beyond the anatomical understanding of life.
─ Revealing living nature and creating a new cosmic narrative

Fabre devoted more than ten years to writing science textbooks for children.
Natural history textbooks, which had been filled with boring and dry sentences, were reborn with Fabre's perspective.
The friendly and lively sentences made botany a particularly interesting subject, and “the jewel of Fabre’s Plantae, a series without parallel” (p. 115) also appeared during this period.
The story of insects, which are inseparable from plants, cannot be left out of Fabre's life.
Even before Fabre, there were always scholars who studied insects, such as French scientist René Réaumur.
But Réaumur's research was "stuck in a tedious and endless nomenclature" (p. 300), and Fabre "humorously criticized it, trying to avoid making the same mistake" (p. 169). After him came Léon Dufour, a giant of French entomology, but he was interested in too many things other than insects, and failed to fully understand the small but vast insect world that can only be known by being intimately involved with it.
Fabre became convinced of his calling after seeing how incomplete and poorly verified even the observations of Dufour, known as the “elder of entomology,” were (p. 81).

Unlike previous scientists, Fabre, who had observed nature with sensitivity and thoughtfulness for decades, says that life is “determined not by anatomical characteristics but by disposition or type of labor” (p. 205).
Fabre says that most scientists have been unable to truly understand the meaning of life by observing life through a microscope, mechanically classifying species, genera, families, and orders, and inferring abilities by dissecting corpses.
It means that we must look at life within the context of each individual's situation.
This conclusion of Fabre's is only now reaching us with a resonance in the developed bioethics and botanical sciences.
Perhaps, due to our history of human-centered measurement of animal intelligence and behavior, plant physiology, etc., we have become less and less able to appreciate the wonders of life.

Author Le Gros says:
“It will certainly be a long time before a new Fabre appears in the world.” (p. 307)
Do we really have an environment today where a new Fabre can emerge?
Fabre's innate temperament, his exposure to the culture of science, his encyclopedic knowledge, and his profound understanding of the educational curriculum, which he constantly updated through nearly a decade of writing textbooks, allowed him to delve deeply into his research without limit.
Moreover, Fabre's ability as a great observer to notice the spectacle created by small creatures, to understand their habits, and to perceive them as "a mysterious context connected to the vast universe" (p. 157) is something that cannot be achieved through specialized knowledge alone.
The true skill and talent of observation is “an ever-awake intelligence” (p. 157).
“The desire to tirelessly immerse oneself until one reaches the truth” (p. 157) has firmly supported his life and continues to resonate with the world to this day.

In conclusion, the structure tells us nothing about ability.
The agency does not explain its functions.
Let the experts be distracted by their lenses and microscopes.
Perhaps they will leisurely recount a vast amount of detail about this or that thing, species, genus, family, or order.
No, perhaps we could conduct subtle research and spend countless pages detailing subtle variations without even fully understanding the problem.
You might miss out on what's truly wonderful.
… … A Provençal singer who boasts of the intuition that is the privilege of genius once expressed this thought in beautiful lyrics.


Oh! Fools with scalpels
Looking for death, they think they know
The virtues of bees and the secrets of the hive

─ From Chapter 8, “The Miracle of Instinct”

3.
What choices have great scientists made in life?
─ Providing equal education to workers, tenant farmers, and women
─ A question posed by a life ripe with the world

Fabre has a surprising career.
It is exactly one year of city council activity.
His interest was not in winning power through factional strife, but in a better future and a more developed humanity.
Unlike worldly people who are preoccupied with maintaining their dignity, he worked and worked solely for the sake of learning.
He believed that learning opportunities, which were more important to him than anything else, should be equal, so he provided lectures without discrimination to workers, tenant farmers, and women.
For him, nature was a place of learning for all people around the world.

But as Fabre's fame grew, so did the envy and jealousy directed at him.
People were displeased with Fabre, who drew evidence solely from observation rather than from the authoritative theories of the academic world and acted independently, and called him a “dissident” (p. 105) and “a heretic and a disgrace” (p. 106) for his actions as an egalitarian educator teaching science to girls.
Overcome with disgust, Fabre retires to Orange to distance himself from people.
Fabre settled down in search of his own “Eden” (p. 140).
How chaotic life is, how even scientists, who have presented irrefutable evidence based on observation, have been oppressed by this absurd world, how they have been able to continue their observations despite the help they receive from those around them, what choices and foregoes in life have great observers made.
These impressions and questions that inevitably arise while reading the book allow readers to come up with their own answers about nature and the world.

As Henri Bergson, who contributed to this book, said, “Only intuition can tell us what life truly is.” (p. 158) This can also be applied to understanding this world full of life.
This is why Fabre's life and works, which brought to life on this earth the value that only a living, not a dead, discipline can provide through the act of observation, can be boldly called "the scriptures of nature" (p. 352).
I hope that this book, filled with Fabre's words and life, will become a hopeful message about the coexistence of nature and humanity, and that "a world filled with miracles and poetry" (p. 31) will be revealed to all.

Fabre asserted the continuity of progress.
I believed in a better, less brutal future, a more perfect humanity governed by more harmonious and less brutal norms.
… … He looked at the simplest creatures with the most amazing perspective.
The body of a very insignificant insect suddenly became a transcendental secret, revealing the abyss of the human soul or giving a glimpse of the stars.
Although Fabre's research contradicts evolutionist theory, it concludes with the same instructive conclusion: all creation moves slowly and ceaselessly toward gradual progress.
─ From “Evolution or “Theory of Biological Variation””