A Handbook of Living Primates

Now that books purporting to show that man is just an ape at heart, and in other ways, are making the best seller lists, a handbook of the tribe itself should command more than ordinary interest. The idea of this book seems an excellent one: it indeed appears to meet its objective as a useful, working volume (a little bit on the bulky side) of the living primates. Falling between Osman Hill's multivolume, The Primates and something like Ivan Sanderson's, The Monkey Kingdom, it can be stated that the illustrations are good to excellent and the information conveyed to the reader (in telegrafese) is quite abundant. Obviously specialists in one or a few primate forms may be unhappy with the coverage. However, the reviewer, as an old (lapsed) Tarsiologist was glad to catch up with recent literature on this wonderful little beast. Only a very few primate forms are at all well studied in any systematic way and it is a measure of our relative neglect of our non-kissing cousins that of the 56 listed genera even the gestation periods are unknown in 26 and only approximately known in another 13. This makes for a large body of ignorance of the endocrinology of the primates, to mention but one area, and generalizations about their sexual behavior tenuous indeed. Identification of species is greatly enhanced by the compendious list of common, generic and specific names, and the volume would be a useful accompaniment on a visit to the monkey house of a good zoo were it not for the deplorable job of binding delivered by the Academic Press. A word about the reference list and index. Considerable reliance on secondary sources means that the reader must fight his way to the originals by a devious route. Figure 3 on p. 41 is a strictly personal example. It is astonishing that Ruch's Bibliographia Primatologica could escape documentation except on grounds of over-familiarity. On the other hand, Goodman's excellent papers on primate immunochemistry (and taxonomy) are all listed but tracing them into the text is a major task and the index is no help. I suspect that other such nuggets are lurking in the references, but not in the index. This reviewer is constantly surprised by the sheer energy expended in compiling longevity records of animals in captivity-and by their almost total meaninglessness. A more useful addition to Part III, the Appendix, would have been the emergence of the dentitions in the one form in which it has been definitively studied, M. mulatta (Hurme and van Wagenen). This Handbook is warmly recommended to students and workers in primate biology and to interested bystanders generally of "This Simian World." H. R. CATCHPOLE Department of Pathology University of Illinois Chicago, Illinois