|
Book Review |
M. Moureau & G Brace (eds). Editions Technip, Paris, 2000. US$ 160.00 hardback; xxix+1096pp. ISBN 2-7108-0749-1.
| The first 250 words of the full text of this article appear below. Images appear only in PDF or full-text views. |
It is an unusual task to review a dictionary. It’s a book full of words, half are English, half are French. What else is there to say? In this case a great deal. It is indeed, as it says in its English translation, a ‘Comprehensive Dictionary of Earth Sciences’. There can be few words left out in the 37 000 terms within its1096 pages which range from ‘aa – coulée de lave scoriacée de type hawaïen’ to ‘Zyriankien – Upper Pleistocene glaciation in Siberia, equivalent to the Würm (local term)’ by way of cladistic analysis, plasticity index and sequence stratigraphy. Also included are entries for important geoscientists such as Louis Agassiz and Arthur Holmes.
Its origins can be traced back to the mid 1960s when documentation specialists and geologists from the Institute Francaise des Pétrole, Total, Elf, and the Bureau de Recherches Géologiques et Minières developed a common language for indexing their documents that had to be compatible with the English vocabularies used by the University of Tulsa and the American Geological Institute for indexing their databases, and the French vocabulary used by the Bulletin Signalétique of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. An account of the experience gained since then and the extensive use computers that have aided the compilation of this new publication is contained in the preface. Following the preface there is an excellent description of how the dictionary is set out and how to use it to best effect. The book
