For Psychologists

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31256, 31 December 1966, Page 4

For Psychologists

The Worm Re-turns. Edited by James V. McConnell. Allen and Unwin. 182 pp.

Experimental psychologists are perhaps more ready to have a quiet laugh at themselves and their activities than any other sort of laboratory scientists; this collection of essays and somewhat irregular verse is drawn from the “Worm Runner’s Digest,” a journal which is now quite famous both for its serious scientific papers and for the spoofs which it regularly publishes. If we really want to appreciate all the satire in this book then we will have to know what psychologists and biologists usually write about, but some of the articles have a moral lesson for us even when we do not quite understand what is being satirised. A delightful article entitled “Nice people don’t eat” explores all the consequences

that would follow If it were human eating and not human mating that was tabooed. “Our whole society would be marked by a burning interest in the topic. . . . Adolescents would have guilty daydreams of Gargantuan banquets, endless stories on food would circulate amongst the vulgar, and the churches would be in perpetual commotion about allusions to food in movies and plays, traces of immoral eating parties left in parks and on beaches, the public display of forks and spoons in disreputable shops. . . .”

The book also contains excellent advice on how to write incomprehensible prose and prove for example that all horses are the same colour or that Alexander the Great did not exist and had an infinite number of limbs. There is even a preface by Arthur Koestler who, as usual, should not be taken too seriously. This book is suitable for psychologists, psychologists’ wives and all readers of any sort of science fiction. r.-