"A genius writing in the wilderness". This quote from the preface just about sums it up for me.

"The Soul Of The Ape" about our (not so distant) cousins makes one realise how disconcertingly similar we are to them. "The Soul Of The White Ant" is about the amazing hidden world of a very complex organism, and how tough life is, even for the tiny ants. As a lay person I found both books fascinating with some startling discoveries. Marais' theories seemed quite plausible to me. Not only did he record his many fascinating observations but he also put forward some intriguing hypotheses to explain them.

I feel very, very fortunate to have been given this 1990 edition published by Jonathan Ball. Beautifully bound on high quality paper with lovely sketches and interesting photographs. The combination of Marais' two famous books is further enhanced by the fascinating preface written by Leon Rousseau, who also wrote the author's highly recommended biography "The Dark Stream". This essay draws much on the material in "The Dark Stream" but also contains new information that came to light only after "The Dark Stream" was first published. The work of Marais is also put into context with the global development of the evolution theory and ethology. Apart from Darwin, credit is also given to other important figures in the field:- Henri Faber, Karl von Frisch, Sir Francis Galton, J. B. Watson, Konrad Lorentz, Niko Tinbergen and Maeterlink (who is accused of getting the Nobel Prize for a work that he plagiarized from Marais' published articles).

Much time has passed since these books were first written. Incidentally:- both books were published posthumously. Marais failed to publish them in his life time:- partly due to the chaos in his personal life caused by his morphine addiction, partly because he lacked confidence being an untrained scientist and partly because he kept revising the text, especially "The Soul of the Ape". But in spite of the passage of time and the sometimes strange words and phrases used, these books are still highly readable today.

The background on the author provided in the excellent preface could stand on its own as a piece of fascinating reading. Eugène Marais was a man who could tame a scorpion, who called a frog to his verandah in the evenings to feed on dead flies, who kept a bee hive on his bedside table so that he could observe them closely during lazy summer afternoons and who stayed up all night in an attempt to discover the mystery of the fertilization of a particular species of grass!

Finally, a thought from the son of Eugène Marais:
"In any piece of writing by my father you can always see at work the poet, the journalist, the morphine addict." ( )