Encyclopaedias come in two broad categories. The original kind is the everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-everything sort, of which the Encyclopaedia Brittanica remains the shining exemplar. The second and more numerous type is the everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-subject X kind. Though the latter is certainly less ambitious than the former, such subject-based encyclopaedias still involve a prodigious amount of work and have their own special problems.
The Encyclopaedia of Evolution, published by Oxford University Press, is an ambitious subject-centred encyclopaedia, and, as such, illustrates both the strengths and problems of this kind of publishing project. In preparation for several years, it involved the collective editorial efforts of seven distinguished evolutionary biologists, working in collaboration with the editor-in-chief, Dr Mark Pagel (University of Reading). The editorial board had to decide on topics and pick authors and supervise the final editing. In addition, two editors at OUP provided considerable amounts of their time and attention to steer the project to completion. The result is a twovolume book consisting of 365 articles by 330 contributors, which weighs in at 9ยฝ pounds.
The stated aim of the project was to produce a collection of articles that would be of interest and usefulness to the general reader, to biologists broadly and, more particularly, to evolutionary biologists themselves. The articles divide into two basic types. At the beginning of volume 1, there are ten so called ''overview articles'' on subjects of broad interest, which, in turn, serve to introduce many of the more specific topics that follow; these essays are aimed especially at the general reader. The bulk of the contributions, however, consist of the second kind of article: shorter, more specialised pieces on ''technical and topical'' subjects. Several of the latter deal with particularly complex subjects, e.g. hominid evolution, and have, accordingly, been allotted two or three articles. The technical and topical section also includes 25 bibliographic sketches of individuals who played major roles in the history of evolutionary biology.