The International Association of Geochemistry and Cosmochemistry was organized in 1967, and held its first meeting at UNESCO Headquartels that year in association with its symposium on The Origin and Distribution of the Elements'.
The publication of this book is extremely timely, for the next major advances in manned space flight after Project Apollo will most likely be made in earth orbital operations.
The XIIlth General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union, held in Prague from 22 to 31 August, 1967, brought together more than 1800 active astron- omers from 40 countries.
The European Space Research Organisation put its first satellite into orbit in March 1968 and was successful with two more before the end of that year.
The idea of the organization of a Symposium on Spiral Structure came at a special meeting of Commission 33 on Spiral Structure during the 12th General Assembly of the IAU in Prague, 1967.
The changing character of the IAU General Assemblies becomes most clear from a comparison of the agenda of the Brighton meeting with that of one of the earlier meetings.
After the same pattern as the XIII th General Assembly of the International Astronom- ical Union the present Volume of the Highlights in Astronomy contains the texts of the invited discourses given at the XIVth General Assembly held in Brighton, England, August 1970.
When the Executive Committee of the International Astronomical Union asked me, in 1968, to organize a Symposium on White Dwarfs it became evident that members of at least four Commissions of the IAU should participate, and that the most oppor- tune place, and time to hold such a Symposium would be somewhere in the British Isles and just preceding the Fourteenth General Assembly at Brighton in August, 1970.
The present volume contains papers presented during the Advanced Study Institute on the 'Structure and Evolution of the Galaxy' held under the auspices of the Science Committee, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Lagonissi near Athens, Greece between 8-19 September 1969.
The publication in English of this monograph seems to me to indicate the ever- increasing interest of astrophysicists in the physical and dynamical problems of planetary nebulae-one of the most interesting and fruitful branches of theoretical astrophysics.
The proposal to organize a Symposium on circumstellar matter and extended atmo- spheres in binary systems was first made by the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory to the Executive Committee of the International Astronomical Union in the summer of 1969.
We have in this volume, compiled a connected account of the proceedings of the Symposium on Wolf-Rayet and High-Temperature Stars held at Buenos Aires.
'Galactic Radio Astronomy' was chosen as the subject of this Symposium, which was held in conjunction with the IAU General Assembly that took place in Sydney in August 1973, largely because it is a very suitable Southern Hemisphere topic.
This book contains the lectures presented at the Summer Advanced Study Institute, 'Earth's Particles and Fields' which was held at the University of Sheffield, England, during the period August 13-24, 1973.
This conference is a tribute to those astronomers who pioneered the investigation of this subject such a short time ago and who carried it through to its present state.
In recent years it has become apparent that con- tributions to our knowledge about the interstellar medium are made by practically all forms of astronomy ranging from radio- to gamma ray observations, and from cosmic ray measurements.
This book contains a set of articles based on a session of the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science held in San Francisco in February, 1974.
