The Life of the Caterpillar

Set a column of caterpillars marching nose to tail in a ring, and they will circle it for seven days.

Not yet released. This edition is finished and in production. Write to the press and we will let you know the day it goes on sale.

About this edition

The great French naturalist Jean-Henri Fabre, the shepherd’s son who became the Homer of the insects, turns his patient, loving eye from the spider to the caterpillar, and finds a whole world of small wonders. The Pine Processionary spins its silken purse against the winter and marches its followers out each night in an endless file, each nose to the tail ahead. The Psyches build themselves little faggot cases and carry their houses on their backs. The Great Peacock, largest moth of Europe, is summoned across miles of darkness by a female he cannot see, on a scent no instrument of Fabre’s could detect. And the humble Cabbage-caterpillar meets its patient, terrible enemy in the grub of a wasp.

Written with such warmth and exactness that it reads like literature rather than science, The Life of the Caterpillar (1916) is natural history as it is meant to be: a naturalist in love with his subject, watching the small lives of his sun-baked patch of Provençal ground until they give up their secrets.

The companion to Fabre’s The Life of the Spider, complete and unabridged in the classic English of Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, with the translator’s note and his full endnotes, bound behind an original painting.

Details

• Jean-Henri Fabre (1823–1915), translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos
• The complete 1916 text, fourteen chapters, the translator’s note and 51 endnotes
• Solocosmo Press
• The Lightbound Library
• Paperback and hardcover, 6 × 9, 286 pages