Symmetry: A Stereoscopic Guide for Chemists by Ivan Bernal, Walter C. Hamilton, John S. Ricci (review)

158 Books Animals and Their Colors: Camouflage, Warning, Coloration , Courtship and Territorial Display, Mimickry. Michael Fogden and Patricia Fogden. Crown Publishers, New York, 1974. 172 pp., illus. $9.95. Reviewed by Marc Bornstein* Of the vast variety of morphological adaptations, one of the most common and most pleasing is color. Most diurnal as well as many nocturnal species utilize color in one or more ways toward environmental and/or social adaptation. Thus, for example, the melanistic form of the peppered moth has survived its nonmelanistic cousin where industrial pollution has killed off lichens and blackened tree trunks. Color has been found to play a critical role in the frequency of social interactions as well as in the hierarchy of dominance in several species. To observe color in its several functions and to explore its variety are the purposes of this slender, but lavishly illustrated introduction to this subject. The authors, two zoologists who have (camera in hand) roamed over the globe, present over 180color photographs providing examples of color functions widely found in the animal kingdom. As they state in the introduction: ‘We believe the most valuable part of the book to be the collection of color photographs ...’and I agree, because the text falls far short of the possibilities that its subject engenders. This is not to say that many of the important themes and topics of interest are not represented; they are, but, unfortunately, mostly in a cursory fashion, e.g. only three pages are devoted to the use of color by humans. After giving a very general introduction to the several potential uses of color to animals and mentioning chemical and physical aspects of color, they discuss the utility of color in camouflage and warning and the alluring, mimetic, social and ornamental functions that colors serve. In the course of their treatment of these and other minor or related issues, they frequently draw on examples from their own observations, as well as from the published naturalist and experimentalist literature. However, they include very little new exploration of color processes or of novel examinations of the curious evolutionary development of color vision. Psychologists, for example, often wonder why humans and other diurnal animals have color vision at all, especially since patterns frequently convey information more efficiently and the physiological mechanisms of color vision are one and the same as those of good pattern vision for which the visual system has been shown to be highly specialized. Is color present because it carries no positive disadvantage? Or, to the former point, several comparative studies have now begun to delimit the sensory capacities of animals, and, although there is some mention of differencesh perception related to vision of the ultraviolet or infrared, no modern analyses from the animal’s eye-view are included. Although there is no clear statement of the argument for evolutionary pressure and the tone of the text on this point is sometimes ambiguous (for example, ‘chameleons can change colors at will’), nonzoologists can, if they are careful, read this book both profitably and enjoyably. In light of the fact that the classical studies (e.g., Poulton (1890) and Cott (1940)) are ponderous, the Fogdens’ introductory book has a high redeeming value. If you are in a library and you find the notion of color-as-adaptation intriguing, a browse through the pictures and captions of Animals and Their Colors can be rewarding. Infinite Polyhedra. A. Wachman, M. Burt and M. Kleinman. In English and Hebrew. Technion, Haifa, Israel, 1974. 102 pp., illus. Paper. Reviewed by Magnus J. Wenninger** Here is a book that undoubtedly will bring many hours of *Dept. of Psychology, Princeton University, Princeton, N.J. 08540, U.S.A. **Saint Augustine’s College, P.O. Box N3940, Nassau, Bahamas. fascinating involvement to any builder of polyhedron models. It belongs in the growing set of such books, both new and reprinted, that are now available. It might best be described as an introduction to and a description of a well-defined set of polyhedral forms, the infinite regular uniform polyhedra; regular, in the sense that all the faces are regular polygons; uniform, in the sense that all the vertices are alike. In these two respects...