Book Reviews and Announcements

Since the first edition of this book appeared in 1973 several spectacular developments in e.g. carbon-13 NMR spectroscopy, HPLC and mass-spectroscopy have occurred. The number of known substances reported from plant sources has increased considerably in the past 11 years, the price of the inevitable new edition of Phytochemical Methods has unfortunately more than tripled. The structure of the second edition has not been changed. Every chapter has been updated to the level of 1984, 30-50% of the references refer to books and papers of the last decade. The book is, as might be expected from Dr. Harbome, well written, informative and gives a good general account of the techniques employed in phytochemistry. Due to the enormous number of known plant constituents a few drawbacks are inevitable in a book of limited size. It is impossible to cover all the representative techniques in protein chemistry within the limits of seven pages and to mention the procedure of Lowry et at. as a reliable method for determining the protein content of any plant preparation is questionable. The book provides a comprehensive summary of methods, but many extraction and isolation procedures are mentioned too briefly or sometimes omitted. How to prepare a pure fraction of e.g. organic acids, cardenolides or gibberellins (to mention a few) is by no means to be learned from this book only. The general reference section and the supplementary references at the end of each chapter are important, making this book rather a library handbook than a laboratory handbook. No important class of compounds has been ignored. The book is primarily intended for students (botany, pharmacognosy) and with 25 well described practical experiments in the isolation of various natural products they can get an elegant introduction into the phytochemistry of higher plants. I hope that every laboratory will be able to buy a copy.