World crops: Cool season food legumes

The genesis of the International Food Legume Research Conference (IFLRC) can be traced back to 1983 - and so this Volume, the Proceedings of that Conference, has had a gestation period of close to five years. Professor Norman Simmonds, the perennial Book Review Editor of Experimental Agriculture, has expressed the opinion (vol. 22, p. 201, 1986) that "e;Many symposial volumes are just plain awful!"e; Elsewhere (Nature vol. 312, pp. 201-2, 1984), Anthony Watkinson - then a Commissioning Editor at Oxford University Press has described several reasons which have led him to believe that "e;Conference proceedings - symposia - are generally disliked . . . . To put it mildly, this type of publication has a bad name"e;. The problems, from an author's perspective, of contributing to any many-authored publication are aired in an exchange of correspondence in Biologist (vol. 30, pp. 123 and 180, 1983; and vol. 31, pp. 3 and 69,1984). And from the editor's viewpoint, D. J. Weatherall - then Nuffield Professor of Clinical Medicine at the University of Oxford - has described (Nature vol. 317, p.