Naturalist, Author. Eugene Marais' work as a naturalist, gained less public attention and appreciation than his contributions to literature. He discovered the Waterberg Cycad, a plant that is found a mile high in sandstone hills of the Waterberg Range. It was named Encephalartos eugene-maraisii in honor of Marais. He was the first person to study the behavior of wild primates, and his observations continue to be cited in contemporary evolutionary biology. Critics considered him among the greatest of the Afrikaner poets and remains one of the most popular, and described as the first professional Afrikaner poet. Marais believed that the craft of writing was as important as inspiration for poetry. He was in London studying law when the Second Boer War started in October of 1899, thus as an Afrikaner was put on parole as an enemy alien. Toward the end of the war, he attempted to help a German supplier to get ammunition to South Africa but became ill with Malaria. After the end of the Second Boer War in 1902, he became one of the leaders of the Second Afrikaans Language Movement, writing more in his native language than English. The Afrikaans language was rooted in the Dutch language. Some of his finest poems deal with the wonders of life and nature, but he also wrote about meriless death. Starting as a teenager, Marais developed morphine addiction and suffered from melancholy, insomnia, depression and feelings of isolation. In 1926 Maurice Maeterlinck, the 1911 Nobel Prize in Literature recipient, wrote in the French language, “The Life of Termites,” which had many similarities to the Marais' 1923 book “The Soul of the White Ant,” which was written in Afrikaans. Marais attempted to take Maeterlinck to international court for plagiarism, but this failed. With a similar plot, Maeterlinck had written “The Life of the Bee” in 1901, which followed in 1907 by “The Intelligence of Flowers” and after this ordeal, “The Life of the Ant” in 1930 and “The Glass Spider” in 1932. At this point, Marais considered Maeterlinck as giving him a “left-handed compliment.” In 1936, suffering from narcotic withdrawal for days, he borrowed a shotgun on the pretext of killing a snake, but executed a self-inflicted gun shot wound to the chest that was not fatal. At that point, he put the gun barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger. He married once and his wife died from childbirth complications eight days after his son was born. He was buried next to her. Since 1961 The Eugene Marais Prize is a South African literary prize awarded for a first or early publication in Afrikaans.