Primate parent and offspring 



common ancestry with apes, monkeys, 

 and lemurs. All primates have a rich so- 

 cial life and face similar problems in 

 raising their offspring. All primate par- 

 ents must provide food, protection, and 

 education to their young. All face ques- 

 tions of how and when to wean babies 

 from the breast, how to get youngsters 

 to take care of themselves and relate to 

 others, how to let them know it's time 

 to go off on their own. Just as people 

 must ensure that Johnny can read, 

 chimpanzees must teach their young- 

 sters to find the best-tasting termites. 



Harriet J. Smith brings impressive 

 credentials to the writing of this fasci- 

 nating book on comparative parenting. 

 A clinical psychologist in family prac- 

 tice and the mother of two human fe- 

 males, she also holds a Ph.D. in com- 

 parative psychology and has raised sev- 

 eral generations of cottontop tamarin 

 monkeys in her backyard. Although the 

 book includes a few examples from 

 Smith's therapeutic files (with the 

 names changed, of course), she draws 

 mostly from an impressive variety of an- 

 thropological and zoological studies of 

 groups ranging from hunter-gatherers 

 in the Philippines to gorillas in Africa 

 and red howler monkeys in the jungles 

 of Venezuela. 



As one might imagine, parenting 

 styles among primates vary as 

 widely as they do among human cul- 

 tures. Marmoset dads in Central and 

 South America, for instance, are loving 

 fathers and share in infant care. Silver- 

 back gorillas, though affectionate and 

 concerned, keep pretty much to them- 

 selves, offering protection to their fam- 

 ilies but little parental help or guidance. 



And female orang- 

 utans in the forests of 

 Borneo are paradig- 

 matically doting single 

 mothers: they raise an 

 average of three off- 

 spring during their 

 lifetime, devoting years 

 to each one without 

 the slightest help. 

 Smith's thought- 

 provoking book, despite its partial gen- 

 esis in her family practice, is not in- 

 tended as a guide to effective child rear- 

 ing. But I'd recommend it to any parent 

 or prospective parent, with this caveat: 

 What's good for a tarsier or a lemur 

 may be dysfunctional for a gibbon, a 

 macaque — or a human. 



The Electric Life of Michael Faraday 



by Alan Hirshfeld 

 Walker and Company 2006; $24.00 



The twenty-first century would 

 not exist as we know it were it 

 not for a nineteenth-century English 

 experimenter named Michael Faraday. 

 Lest that assessment seem hyperbolic, 

 consider that until the 1820s, when 

 Faraday devised a way to make elec- 

 tricity rotate a metal rod, all the world's 

 work had been done by steam, water, 

 animal, or human power. Faraday's ro- 

 tating rod led to the modern electric 

 motor, the cornerstone of our modern 

 electrified world. 



His demonstration, a decade later, 

 that a varying magnetic field could in- 

 duce an electric current in a coil of wire 

 is the principle behind the electric gen- 

 erator, which provided the power to run 

 those electric motors. In time, Faraday's 

 inventions and their direct descendants 

 found their way into every electric 

 power plant, every automobile alterna- 

 tor, every air conditioner, garbage dis- 

 posal unit, and DVD player — in short, 

 into virtually every aspect of modern 

 technological society. 



That is quite a legacy from a man 

 whose meager formal education was 



supplemented by only a few years ap- 

 prenticed to a bookbinder. Even when 

 Faraday was an honored figure at Eng- 

 land's Royal Institution of Great Britain 

 in London, his salary never exceeded a 

 few hundred pounds a year. As Alan 

 Hirshfeld's sparkling new biography 

 makes clear, Faraday's influence 

 stemmed not from learning or wealth, 

 but from a rich imagination, a brilliance 

 at experimentation, and an openness of 

 character that won friends instantly and 

 made him one of the outstanding sci- 

 entific teachers of his century. 



When the English chemist Sir 

 Humphry Davy summoned 

 Faraday (who had attended some of 

 Davy's lectures) to join Davy at the 

 Royal Institution in 1813, Davy must 

 have sensed some of those qualities. 

 The young Faraday quickly rose from 

 glorified bottle-washer to full collabo- 

 rator in the most difficult of distillations 

 and preparations. Within a few years he 

 was publishing his own papers and giv- 

 ing his own lectures to learned soci- 

 eties. By 1824 he had been voted into 

 the prestigious Royal Society. 



Beginning in 1826, partly to raise 



Magneto-spark apparatus, now in the Royal 

 Institution in London, was designed by 

 Michael Faraday to generate an electric spark. 



April 2006 NATURAL HISTORY 



65 



