Georgescu-Roegen's The Entropy Law and the Economic Process is important on three counts: a message, a phenomenon, an encounter. Its greatest importance for many will be an encounter with a mind powerful, and lucid, serieux, enormously erudite, ranging over the history and philosophy of science, epistemology, mechanics, and thermodynamics, biophysics, biology, chemistry, mathematics, econometrics, economic theory, and social policy. The book has not at all the form and organization of a scholarly monograph. It is without a systematically developed line or argument or theory, and is not a set of separable essays. It is rather an intellectual odyssey, a kind ofas I see it, with multifaceted arguments and recurrent themes held together by the integral quality of a mind that roams the wide universe of science and policy. It is, therefore, a book whose message, whose purpose, and whose point will admit varied interpretations. For that reason let the qualifying phrase as I understand it be prefixed to all that follows.