The Moon Man: Biography of Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay.

RU 1010 Webster, E. M. The Moon Man: Biography of Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984, xxv, 421 pages, notes, bib, index. Fine in fine dust jacket.

"This story of an outstandingly strange and interesting man is a triumph of modern biograpny. Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay (1846-1888) was one of the most extraordinary of all the nineteenth-century savant-adventurers. a brilliant student of Ernst Haeckel, he embraced the natural sciences at a time when the genius of Darwin was revolutionizing Western cosmology. In his short lifetime he made the whole world his laboratory: sponges in the Red Sea, and the ancestry of sharks, head measurements in New Guinea; Negrito races in Malay jungles; marine life in Sydney Harbor -- all these and a hundred other topics and places engaged his curiosity. 'This is much more than a highly literate recounting of Miklouho-Maclay's expeditionary work it is a fascinating and original study of the psychology of ethnographic research. Its main emphasis is not on the intricacies of native culture but on the mind of an ethnographer, equipped with observation skill and deeply sensitive to -- and moved by -- both the logic and the illogic of basic humanity'. (A. Vucinich)." - from the jacket flap.