The Great Apes: a Study of Anthropoid Life

THIS stately book by Prof. and Mrs. Yerkes is an invaluable contribution to the study of the higher apes—gibbon, orang-utan, chimpanzee, and gorilla—and the historical part is so well done that it should never require elaboration. The account of personal observations on chimpanzee and gorilla is not less valuable, but it will, of course, be added to and possibly modified by the authors and others. In both functions of the book, the historical and the original, we recognise the critical acumen of the trained psychobiologist. In the historical sections there is a rigorous and much-needed separation of the wheat from the chaff the record of personal observations is a model of sceptical carefulness.The Great Apes: a Study of Anthropoid Life.By Prof. Robert M. Yerkes Ada W. Yerkes. (Published on the Louis Stern Memorial Fund.) Pp. xix + 652. (New Haven: Yale University Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1929.) 45s. net.