THE SOUL OF THE APE, THE SOUL OF THE WHITE ANT BY EUGENE MARAIS

THE SOUL OF THE APE; THE SOUL OF THE WHITE ANT BY EUGENE MARAIS. HARDCOVER, FULLY INTACT DUST JACKET, 240 PAGES, NO INSCRIPTIONS OR NAMES, IN GOOD CONDITION.

"Eugène Marais's international acclaim is based largely on The Soul Of The Ape and The Soul Of The White Ant, his two pioneering studies of natural history. Here for the first time, these important works appear side by side in a single volume, splendidly illustrated with line drawings by Dick Findlay and numerous colour photographs. The introduction, Eugêne Marais and the Darwin Syndrome, is by Leon Rousseau, author of The Dark Stream, the prize winning life story of Marais. For Eugène Marais and the Darwin Syndrome Rousseau has made use of a mass of material in the possession of Marais's son, some of which only came to light after the latter's death, a number of years after The Dark Stream was published. Drawing on extensive correspondence between Marais and his son during the time that Marais wrote The Soul Of The Ape, Rousseau suggests that Marais may have been trying to cast his son in the supportive role played in Darwin's life by his wife, Emma, finally arriving at the startling hypothesis that the son, whether consciously, subconsciously or by chance, hindered rather than helped the father in completing and publishing his opus magnum. Early in the twentieth century Marais retreated to the wild Northern Transvaal and lived for three years at close quarters with a troop of chacma baboons. The Soul Of The Ape is a record of his experiences, observations and deductions."