South African Entomologists - Eugene Marais, Sydney Skaife, Louis Peringuey, Albert John Hesse (Paperback)

Chapters: Eugene Marais, Sydney Skaife, Louis Peringuey, Albert John Hesse. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 22. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Eugene Nielen Marais (pronounced, 9 January 1871 29 March 1936) was a South African lawyer, naturalist, poet and writer. Marais was born in Pretoria, the thirteenth and last child of his parents, Jan Christiaan Nielen Marais and Catharina. He attended school in Pretoria, Boshof and Paarl and much of his early education was in English, as were his earliest poems. He matriculated at the age of sixteen. After leaving school he worked in Pretoria as a legal clerk and then as a journalist before becoming owner (at the tender age of twenty) of a newspaper called Land en Volk (lit. Land and (the Afrikaner) People). He involved himself deeply in local politics. He began taking opiates at an early age and graduated to morphine (then considered to be non-habitforming and a safer drug) very soon thereafter. He became addicted and his addiction ruled his affairs and actions to a greater or lesser extent throughout his life. When asked for the reasons for taking drugs, he variously pleaded ill health, insomnia and, later, the death of his young wife as a result of the birth of his only child. Much later, he blamed accidental addiction while ill with malaria in Mozambique. Some claim that his use of drugs was experimental and influenced by the philosophy of de Quincey. He married Aletta Beyers but she died from puerperal fever a year later, eight days after the birth of their son, Marais' only child. In 1897still in his mid-twentieshe went to London, initially to read medicine. However, under pressure from his friends, he entered the Inner Temple to study law. (He qualified as an advocate). When the Boer War broke out in 1899, he was put on parole as...More: http: //booksllc.net/?id=2169914