La Revolution Originelle, Essai sur la Gènèse de l'Homme et de la Société. By Marc Chapiro. Paris: Preface by Jean Wahl, Professor at the Sorbonne.  Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin. 1958;  139 pp. About $3.00.

This is a stimulating book, full of surprising challenges. This reviewer was carried away by the wealth of the author's ideas and the lucid language in which they are presented, yet at the same time experienced an increasing sense of perplexity, as though being lured by the author's brilliance and determination into following him where he had not warned us we were going. Why such emotional response, one might ask, to a book entitled The Original Revolution, An Essay on

the Genesis of Man and Society? What is this book? As scientific study? A philosophical essay? What does the author, a sociologist, tell us?

Dr. Chapiro devotes about one fifth of his space to an introduction which is a convincingly reasoned argument in favor of a neo-Lamarckian theory of evolution by transmission of acquired traits. He supports his discussion with quotations from authorities in many and diverse fields. The reader feels embarked on a study in the natural sciences and is startled when he comes upon a comment in the last paragraph of the introduction indicating that the author's main thesis, a theory of the origin of human consciousness and human society, would not be affected by the differences in evolutionary theories that had just been discussed; that the author had found it important to point out certain insufficiencies of Darwinian views mainly because their mechanistic character seemed to go counter to the essence of life (l'esprit de la vie). In Part I of the book the author develops, again with a wealth of diverse references, a series of hypotheses about the environmental stresses in the world of our animal ancestors which would have led to a comparatively sudden transformation of the extinct ancestral primates into the psychically new species of man in whom automatic response to external stimuli is delayed or permanently inhibited, and who consequently has become capable of conceptual thought. The author visualizes our animal ancestors as carnivorous primates, suspicious and a