The life of the fly is a similar collection of essays, also based on Fabre's Souvenirs entomologiques. It is quite a bit more varied than The wonders of instinct, containing 20 chapters, dealing with various kinds of insects, such as, the Anthrax, the Monodontomerus cupreus, greenbottles, grey flesh flies, the bumble-bee fly, and the bluebottle. The majority of the chapters are devoted to describing the life of various kinds of flies, and their grubs and maggots. The flies described in this collection of essays are the kind that most people think of at the word “flies”, namely the shiny green or blue big buzzers, that lay their eggs on meat. It is obvious that the title of this collection derives from the prominent place dedicated to describing these flies. However, The life of the fly also contains five autobiographical chapters which describe Jean-Henri Fabre's recollections of childhood, schooling, and early career in mathematics and chemistry. These chapters describe some of the hardship and hopes of the young Fabre as he grew up in a poor family in the countryside of France, chapters which remind the reader of chapters from Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet which was published at about the same time, when Jean-Henri Fabre was aged between 7 and 11 years old (in the early 1830s).
The chapters on the fly and its grubs in The life of the fly is not for the faint of heart, as it gives detailed descriptions of putrefaction and maggots crawling all over. Incidentally, as in chapter 7 of The wonders of instinct, which was dedicated to the bluebottle, Fabre shows his interest to apply his findings into the nature and behaviour of flies in practical tips for dealing with poultry, fowl and wild birds sold in farmer’s markets. So much decay could be prevented if birds were only sold in a simple paper envelope. Other practical observations in the field of agriculture can be found in the chapter about mushrooms (chapter 18).
In 1859, Jean-Henri Fabre was 36 when Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species all of Fabre’s books were published after 1860, but his years of formation took place before the publication of Darwin’s revolutionary theory. Darwin knew Fabre and “bestowed upon me the title of “incomparable observer” (p. 260). Nonetheless, Jean-Henri Fabre seems to have been skeptic of Darwin’s theory of evolution, particularly doubting the role of heredity. In chapter 5 of The life of the fly Fabre takes the silent Beetle’s place in the witness box, cross-examining myself in all simplicity of soul, as I do the animal, and asking myself whence that one of my instincts which stands out above the others is derived. Grown up in a family of toilers of the earth, Fabre cannot explain where his intellectual capacity and interest for insects comes from, which he calls his instinct. This chapter on heredity should of course have been included in the essay collection entitled The wonders of instinct. Without it, the reader might wonder whether the word “instinct” in the title is a misspelling for “insect”. The essays illustrate that more than 150 years after the publication of On the Origin of Species Darwin’s ideas are so firmly rooted in the consciousness of the reader, that they cannot see the form and behaviour of insects other than as the result of evolutionary processes. However, Jean-Henri Fabre firmly believed that the appearance and instinctive behaviour of insects was fixed, and could not be traced to the insects’ ancestors. ( )