This book covers a very broad subject. It contains sections dealing with the interactions with ligands, particulate matter and organisms, sediments, transport, and metals in the atmosphere and their impact on terrestrial and aquatic systems. The final three sections treat metals in continental waters, in estuaries and coastal environments, and in the ocean, with reference to the incorporation of trace metals in sediments. The long list of references includes more than a thousand titles, demonstrating how many new results have had t o be added to the body of information on this subject in the lastfew years. In the section on metals in continental w-aters, sediment analyses revealed the factors affecting composition, variability of the data, influence of grain size, and metal forms. There is ,z special sub-section on metals in lakes, their cycling and atmospheric inputs. I n the section on estuaries and coastal environments, impact studies for estuaries in the United States. the Mediterranean Sea, and Western Europe are described. The hydrobiologist may be especially interested in the chapter on environmental impact of metals in organisms, such as cadmium concentrations in seeweeds and shore animals in the Severn Estuary and in the benthos off the northwest coast of England, or the uptake by iVytzZus in the Xorth Sea and in the Rhine Estuary. Depth profiles for metals in the oceanic regions of the Atlantic and the Pacific are presented; as ub-section concerns metal enrichment in deep-sea sediments, including that from hydrothermal inputs, particularly in the Atlantis I1 Deep of the Red Sea. There are not many examples of metal concentration in organisms, and perhaps collaboration with biologists would permit this part to be expanded in a subsequent edition. In any case, biologists can now take advantage of all the physical, geological and geographical information summarized in this important new review of an environmental phenomenon that has been receiving more and more attention.