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dispersed literature on the classification of plant and animal communities, comprising divergent approaches of different schools and representing a great experiment on the usefulness of different possibilities for classification. The editor sought in a re- view monograph of 1962 to summarize these schools and their history, and in 1973 published a treatise on 'Ordination and Clas- sification of Communities' as volume 5 of the Handbook of Vegetation Science. We were fortunate, in preparing the latter work, to have a truly international panel of authors to discuss different major ap- proaches to classification. This second edition of the book of 1973 is intended to make the work more widely available in a less expensive form as companion volumes on ordination and on classification of plant communities.