Monthly Bulletin - Clpdigital.org

REVIEWS OF RECENT BOOKS—NOVEMBER 1913 463
adopt a coat-of-arms, which suggestion he laughingly declined, saying
that he had one ready made—three snails surrounding a spade and surmounted
by a cabbage leaf.'
The remaining chapters deal with French gardens of the later
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, garden design in the Netherlands,
English gardens of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, German and Austrian gardens, garden design in Spain, and
the English landscape school and its influence on the Continent. A
very copious bibliography will be found useful by those who desire to
make a further study of the subject or any branch of it. The book is
most lavishly illustrated throughout, and it is obvious that no pains
have been spared by either author or publisher upon its production."
Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, 1913.
By C V. Legros
(Call number qr 710 T74g)
Fabre, Poet of Science
"Dr. C. V. Legros has given us a rare biography in these days of
slash and sensationalism, which Mr. Bernard Miall has translated into
good, unaffected English from the French original. Dr. Legros describes
Fabre's character as that of one of nature's poet-lovers. He is
no dry dissecting student of pistils and stamens who cannot see a
flower without tearing its petals and who sets no value on its perfume.
Fabre is a priest of nature, learned in her rituals, initiated into her
secrets, one whom 'Nature the old nurse' took upon her knee at an
early age, and who shares the Christlike love of S. Francis for 'my
brothers the birds and my sister the water.' He has called the yellowwinged
wasp, the Sphex, 'the brown violinist of the clods.' As some
ancient philosopher of Egypt he has watched the habits of the beetle
the Egyptians immortalised in the scarabaeus, that symbol of divinity,
the 'Scarabaeus sacer, with his incurved feet and clumsy legs,' who begins
to roll his everlasting pellet, and, stripping it of its embroidery of
fiction, demonstrated that its true story was even more marvellous
than the most delicate fairy tale. He has been that rarest combination
of the modern soul with the fantastic and beautiful Pagan—a Poet of
Science—and all who love the more mysterious aspects of the hidden
Hertha spirit of the world-tree Yggdrasil will find much joy in perusing
this life history of one of her most diligent and exquisite seekers."
Saturday review, 1913.
(Call number 92 F115I)
The Library has the following books by M. Fabre:
Insect life; souvenirs of a naturalist. 1901 595-7 Fn
Life of the spider. 1913 595-4 Fi 1
Social life in the insect world. 1912 595-7 Fns