Muelos. A Stone Age Superstition about Sexuality.: By Weston La Barre. New York: Columbia University Press. 1984.

For years, psychoanalysts have had available a remarkable resource in Weston La Barre, James B. Duke Professor of Anthropology (now Emeritus) at Duke University. This joyous scholar, with his endless curiosity, non-obsessive capacity to collect information, wry and patient (also impatient) insight, acute intelligence, informed immersion in psychodynamic issues, and unending willingness to do the hard thinking necessary both to fit data to theory and theory to data, is a model analysts should turn to when we want to explore beyond our safer shores. (If only sociobiologists and like speculators in human affairs—including too many analysts, for my taste, from Freud on—were as rigorously committed to the scholarship that should be the ticket of admission to grand theorizing.)

Startling ideas and findings based on scholarship rather than loose intellectual machinery, humour as a technique for teaching, the slow but cumulative effect of evidence in building an argument, the gathering in of far-flung sources to make coherent argument: he has done this before, especially in his great books, The Human Animal (1954) and The Ghost Dance (1970).

In Muelos (which means 'marrow' and, curiously, includes the central nervous system), his assignment—probably never tried before—is to trace, with demonstrable evidence, a fundamental, very widespread idea—'that semen is