lent of ten average volumes. It has over 3,300 footnotes and about 2,400 names of authors cited. This reviewer has been reading it steadily for several weeks and has accumulated 62 pages of notes. The book is written in a clear style. Almost every page is packed with information. The editing is superb; 1 could only find two misprints and one missing diagram in the whole million words. If used as a textbook, it would suffice for a whole college major. It is a monument to two of the most remarkable minds of our age-James and Jessie Miller. It has been a privilege to count them among my friends. It is a book that is clearly almost impossible to review in a brief essay. In an age of information overload, unfortunately very few people are likely to read it, though it will be rewarding for many to dip into it. One wishes almost that it had been put out in ten volumes. Nevertheless, it will make an impact on the future, and it will not be surprising if it produces a whole school of research.
Miller does not hesitate to compare his product to that of Mendeleyev, whose periodic table of elements created a taxonomy which dominated the whole future of chemistry. The reader might well begin this book indeed by looking at the table on pages 1028 and 1029, which is Miller's "periodic table." He identifies 19 components of living systems, each of which is, or at least should be, manifested in seven different levels, making a matrix of 7 x 19, or 133 boxes, only 10 of which he has been unable to fill with examples, and only 3 of which do not seem to have any examples. The seven levels are: the cell, the organ, the I Reproduced, with permission, from Contemporary Sociology.