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THE CLAMANT RECEPTION of Lorenz's popular account of animal aggression and of Morris's The Naked Ape suggest considerable modification of resistance to Darwin's book one hundred years ago. A reassurance emerges today from our connection with the animal world. I am thinking not only of the provision in such books of an ancient lineage for the sacredness of tribal and personal property. There is also the suggestion that the behaviour of mammals in their communities seems in important respects milder than our own. They are delightful ancestors in view, that is, of the concentration camps, in view of the very many pretences and disciplines that have now slipped to reveal widely the abysses of human nature, a shift of control in which the findings of psycho-analysis, generally misconstrued, have undoubtedly played a part, particularly in the matter of the outmoding of religion as well as of idealistic or optimistic standpoints at the very time that the negativism of man has been extensively felt as incorrigible, even without reference to psycho-analysis. There exists in some intellectual circles today so strong a horror of the human state that a writer, George Steiner, has urged that alleged understanding, protestation, emotional accountancy on the part of authors should cease in the matter of the concentration camp horrors; that the way to measure up to enormity on this scale is silence, drying-up, if only because words have been emasculated by the bending they have suffered from the hypnotic techniques