The Soul of the White Ant (Complete and Unabridged)

Download or read book The Soul of the White Ant (Complete and Unabridged) written by Eugene Marais and published by . This book was released on 2015-03-22 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eugène Marais was born in a farming community near Pretoria in 1872. Journalism was his first career, but he later studied law in London, and by 1910 was in Johannesburg trying to establish himself as an advocate. Increasing depression drove him to retreat to Waterberg, a mountain fastness in northern Transvaal. Settling near a large group of chacma baboons, he became the first man to conduct a prolonged study of primates in the wild. It was this period that produced My Friends the Baboons and provided the major inspiration for The Soul of the Ape. He returned to Pretoria to practise law, to resume his career as a journalist, to continue his animal studies and to write poetry in Afrikaans. In 1926, the year after he had published a definitive article on his original research and conclusions about the white ant, a world-famous European author took half Marais's life-work and published it as his own. This plagiarizing may well have been a major factor in Marais's final collapse. Plagued for many years by ill-health and an addiction to morphine, he took his own life in March 1936.