This symposium concentrated on common principles used by Nature and by engineers to solve problems associated with localization and orientation. The 63 contributions cover current problems and results over a wide area ranging from orientation and flight control in insects, through radar echolocation in bats, bird migration and homing, to marine and aerospace navigation, orientation of fishes, etc. Many of the examples discussed demonstrate that during evolution Nature not always found optimal solutions for engineering problems. Sometimes engineers and physicists discovered and applied useful techniques long before biologists recognized that such principles were used by animals.The different backgrounds of biologists, physicists and engineers (the expected readership of the book) made the organizers of the symposium call for the use of a vocabulary that would be understandable for people outside their fields. Many but not all contributors succeeded. We, therefore, regret that not all chapters have a reference list that includes a few review articles which might serve as a general introduction for readers belonging to a different discipline.Many illustrations are included in the text and the book is well printed. It is a good survey for those investigators who want to be introduced to the field. Hubrecht Laboratory, Utrecht G. A. UBBELS Eric Burgess, Venus: An Errant Twin, Columbia University Press, New York, 160 pp., 1985, $29.95.So much is known about Venus today that the planet certainly deserves a separate book written for the non-scientist. After a very interesting opening chapter the various space missions are described in the next three chapters. The resulting new views of Venus are discussed in three later chapters. The author has succeeded in compiling a lot of information scattered all over the literature into a single publication. However, the amount of detailed information on launching dates, distances, velocities, times of arrival, coordinates of landing sites, weights, etc., in the chapters dealing with the space missions impairs their readability. Most of this information is also given in the Appendix. The later chapters are Space Science Reviews 44 (1986) 393. 394 BOOK REVIEWS satisfactory, but written rather flatly. The facts are related and properly illustrated, but the fascination has faded away.All photographs are black-and-white. Only the jacket illustration is in colour, but the legend ('computer-generated globe of Venus') cannot prevent a non-scientist from getting a wrong impression of Venus.In sum, the book may serve as a very elementary survey of space missions to Venus and modern views of this planet.
