Richard Strauss’ forward to this collection explains the volume's aim as being to ‘present the various aspects of morphometrics in a way that is accessible to readers who might not be acquainted with the voluminous literature on the topic’ (p. v). This is, of course, a laudable goal. But it is by no means unique as there are at least four other collections of morphometrics essays whose purpose is essentially identical, including a previous volume by the editor of this collection (Bookstein & Rohlf Reference Bookstein and Rohlf1990; Marcus et al. Reference Marcus, Bello and García-Valdecasas1993; Marcus et al. Reference Marcus, Corti, Loy, Naylor and Slice1996; Elewa, Reference Elewa2004). Add to these the numerous review articles and introductory treatises that all cover essentially the same ground and one can scarcely avoid the impression that unlike the practitioners of most other fields, morphometricians appear unusually concerned with explaining and justifying themselves to others and feel somehow ill-served by previous attempts to do so.
Naturally, the degree to which any collection succeeds stands or falls on the quality of the articles it contains. This is especially true of the present volume as these articles were solicited by the editor directly and not associated (as has been the case in many of the previous collections) with a morphometrics conference, symposium, or short course. As a result, these essays should represent a comprehensive survey of contemporary activity across the field and the ‘cream of the crop’ of current morphometric thought. Unfortunately, this goal has, in my opinion, not been reached.
This collection is divided into four parts: an introduction and historical overview section, a methods section, an applications section, and a grammatically suspect ‘Scope to the Future of Morphometrics’ section. There are several good essays, notably Reyment's on the history of morphometrics, Krieger's on leaf shape morphometrics, and Strauss’ on group discrimination methods. But overall there are far too many poorly written, incomplete, obscure, and confused presentations of data and discussions of results to recommend that this book serve in any way as an adequate introduction to the topic for novices. Moreover, the editor has made no attempt, either in his very brief introduction, or in his editing of the articles, to draw out any core themes. What readers are left with is the worst of both worlds: an uneven, dispersed, and idiosyncratic presentation of (some) basic concepts of pre-synthesis and post-synthesis morphometrics in the context of a set of highly technical articles. The best I can say is that this volume should be acquired by those whose purpose demands a comprehensive collection of all published morphometric studies (e.g. specialist libraries).
