T HE pathological preoccupation with outer space that is currently afflicting us has not blinded a certain small segment of the scientific community to other problems: the association of sciences called is booming. oceanography, the founding of which as a discipline is usually traced to the publication by Matthew Fontaine Maury of his Physical Geography of the Sea (1855), is now only 1lo years old. Biological oceanography, if we place its birth at the work ofEdward Forbes (1843), is only a dozen years older. The Challenger Expedition of 1872-1876 wedded the two parts of the subject once and for all, and the term has since embraced, despite efforts of special interests to separate them, both the biological and the physical sciences-the seas and all that in them is, as the old catechism has it. The need for increased world food supplies, the demand for better weather forecasting, the growth of geophysical knowledge, the exigencies of defense budgets supported by frightened or nervous nations, the desire for profit, and, one hopes most of all, sheer curiosity have combined to generate the current profusion of marine research. The first International Oceanographic Congress was held in New York in 1959, and international cooperation in oceanography, which may be said to have begun formally in 1902 with the creation of the Conseil Permanent International pour l'Exploration de la Mer (now shortened and Anglicized to ICES), is a commonplace, and a welcome one. We have multiplied the initials: ICNAF (International Commission for the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries); its Pacific counterpart, INPFC (International North Pacific Fisheries Commission); IGY (International Geophysical Year); SCOR (Special Committee on Oceanic Research); IOC (Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission); and so on. Moreover, there is to be a marine section in the IBP (International Biological Program). Man is an animal of the land. Only a small proportion of us normally have access to the sea or turn naturally to it, and the word geography, in spite of its derivation, is usually taken to mean the study of the land. This is no doubt as it should be, for the methods and purposes of geography and oceanography are different; and although attempts have been made to treat the latter as a department of the former (notably in the work of the late Gerhard Schott), such attempts are no longer viable or productive. Oceanography, as witness the books noted here, demands deep specialization in the basic natural sciences. In its successful bridging of the basic sciences it resembles biochemistry or biophysics, and because humanity does not form part of the marine fauna oceanography is not concerned (as geography is) with the social sciences, except superficially. The specialization required of the practitioners of oceanography is in fact the root of the difficulty of keeping the unity of the subject intact, and the reason why it is necessary now and then to refuse to let one group, the physicists or the biologists, corner the term for themselves. Oceanography progresses by cooperation and coordination between specialists, but at the same time the independence and stature of the specializations must be preserved. The books discussed here differ in content, purpose, and excellence, but with one excep-