โ Scribed by P.M.Austin Bourke
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Diagrams are clear, though in a few instances contain so much information as to impair the clarity. The diversity of topics makes it unlikely that individual workers will wish to possess the publication but it should be made readily available in many libraries.
Weather and Agriculture. JAMES A. TAYLOR (Editor). Pergamon Press, Oxford, 1967, 225 pp., 92 illus., 38 tables, 80s. This book is a sad disappointment. Mr. James A. Taylor has been the organiser, convenor and guiding spirit of the symposia on different aspects of climate and agriculture which have been held annually since 1958 at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth. In successive years the themes have been "the growing season", problems of shelter, hill climates, soil climate, diseases of plants and animals, agricultural products, weather hazards, climatic change, early crops and frost. Developing from small beginnings, the meetings have earned a growing reputation, not so much for the quality of the formal papers as for the vigour of interdisciplinary discussion and the stimulus of informed disagreement. As Mr. Hogg, a foundation member, noted when returning thanks at the close of the 1965 symposium, the main benefit of the meetings to the participants was that they came away with a large number of question marks buzzing around in their minds. Something of this quality may be sampled at secondhand in the mimeographed memoranda which provide, at trifling cost, not only the text of the papers but also a summary of the discussion and conclusions.
A worthwhile book, which would constitute a deserved tribute to British agrometeorology, might have been distilled from the symposia proceedings. Mr. Taylor has not attempted this admittedly laborious task. Instead, he simply reproduces, with only minor changes, seventeen out of some fifty papers presented at the first eight Aberystwyth meetings, to which he prefaces an introduction and appends an early paper of his own on the traditional British land-treatment by marling. The almost arbitrary subdivision of the material under three broad headings ("the environment", "the hazards" and "productivity") does nothing to conceal the lack of unity and the disparate quality of the material. Many papers which formed an excellent focus for discussion at the living meetings --as, for instance, Dr. Grainger's individualistic views on plant disease forecasting --give an unrepresentative and unbalanced picture when divorced from the comments which they aroused.
Mr. Taylor's judgment is at fault in permitting him to fill more than onequarter of the book with his own work. His contributions are distinctly lightweight; the opening article, for instance, deals with the microclimate of a North Wales hill on the basis of observations carried out at four sites for no longer than 13 months and with a suspension of the experiment during the lengthy University vacations! On
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