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Tailed Deer" by Moen and Jacobsen unfor tunately seemed much like an adver- t isement for the senior author 's book, published the same year the symposium was held, and cited nine times in the chapter. Statements like "Time, in a biological sense, is a measure of the intensity of life" and " A free-ranging organism has an ecological metabolic rate" and newly coined concepts such as "solar radiation profile" and "critical thermal environment ," which apparently were derived from that work, certainly did little to deepen my understanding of the subject or to inspire me to dig deeper.

The work as a whole should be very stimulating to graduate students in a variety of fields. Even researchers can gain much from it. Gates' mission in assembling this book is not aimed so much at the agricultural meteorologist, who is well aware of the concepts he champions, as it is at the more compart- mentalized zoologists and botanists, who have not received the broad training in mathematics and physics which he correctly indicates is required to fully understand ecology. They must still be converted. On the other hand, many of us often forget some of the basic biological aspects of the problems we are studying, and this collection of papers brought some of my limitations in this regard sorely to mind. Broadening one's horizons is a process that pro- ceeds in two directions. We must also appreciate the solid concepts of the pure zoologists and botanists.

In the final analysis, all I can say is "Read the book ." It was a beneficial experience for me, as I am sure it can be for others.

SHERWOOD B. IDSO (Phoenix, Ariz. )

E n v i r o n m e n t - - Resources , Po l lu t ion and S o c i e t y . W. W. Murdoch (Editor). Freeman, London, 1975, 2nd ed, 496 pp., £5.50

This excellent book is divided into three main parts. The first considers in six chapters the world's resources set against its growing population. This is fol lowed by eight chapters on man-made degradation of the environment and its various consequences. Finally, four chapters deal with the broadly social aspects of environmental pollution -- those concerned with economics, law, politics and the human ecology of city life.

Seventeen chapters on various aspects of the environment, all writ ten by acknowledged experts in the different specialist fields, have been welded in a remarkable way into one coherent tex tbook. This achievement is clearly due in no small measure to the unusual calibre of the editor, whose stamp of highly literate as well as scientific quality imbues the book as a whole. Profes- sor Murdoch is a biology graduate of Glasgow University, who worked on insect populat ion dynamics at Oxford before going to the United States, where he is now Professor of Biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has provided an in t roductory chapter on Ecological Systems and a final one on the difficult interplay of scientific, social and political forces that environmental problems evoke. His editorial tour-de-force also spans the

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main body of the book in the form of nine pi thy commentaries interlarded between chapters or groups of chapters. These pick out salient points in the scientific arguments and place them in the contex t of the social and political forces that may help or retard due at tention being given to them.

The editor can rightly claim that the book is a unified whole with a sur- prisingiy uniform style of presentation. Each chapter is a sophisticated essay on its particular theme, adequately illustrated with tables and diagrams and with a selected reference list for further reading. The flavour of the book can perhaps be illustrated b y summarizing the contents of MacDonald's chapter on "Man, Weather and Climate" and of the editorial commentary that pre- cedes it. The 15-page chapter deals with the causes of longterm fluctuations in climate, including the increase in carbon dioxide levels and the effects of atmospheric particles and turbidi ty and of thermal pollution, with a section on the man-made microclimates of urban settlements. In his page-long editorial preamble to the chapter, Murdoch underlines some of the difficulties of predicting longterm changes in global climate and our dependence on com- puter models that are hedged with assumptions of doubt fu l validity. He cites a number of new models that have been proposed by other workers since MacDonald's essay was written, and the need for greater caution in global activities that could set in train disastrously irreversible climatic change.

The book is a credit no t only to its editor and his team of authors but equally to its p roof readers, and to the designer, typesetters and printers who are deservedly named on the final page. It is intended for undergraduates at tending elementary and intermediate courses dealing with man and his environment, particularly those taking interdisciplinary courses such as are now provided by many universities. It could be read with equal profit by any intelligent citizen anxious to acquire a balanced view of environmental problems. On him after all depends in the last analysis the social motivation and the funds needed to achieve rational policies of environmental conserva- tion.

B. MOORE (Exeter}

Phenology and Seasonality Modeling. Helmuth Lieth (Editor}. Ecological Studies, 8, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, New York, 1974, 464 pp. 120 figures. US $ 47.80.

Edited by Prof. Helmut Lieth, former Professor at Hohenheim University and at present Professor of Botany and Ecology at the University of North Carolina, USA, there has appeared the book Phenology and Seasonality Modeling; it compiles the experience of 44 researchers, most of them from the U.S.A. and some other from Europe, Africa and South America.