'WHERE has been such an expansion of inI formation in the United Kingdom during the past decade that it has become very hard for the statistician keep up with developments in fields outside his own: the more ordinary citizen wanting figures has difficulty in discovering even what information is available, let alone what it means and what it is worth. It was therefore welcome news hear a few years ago that the Royal Statistical Society had started a program of papers by authorities on the sources available in each field. For some time we have been reading these papers in the Journal of the Society, and the first twenty of them have been published by Oliver and Boyd as Volume One of The Sources and Nature of the Statistics of the United Kingdom, at the very reasonable price of twenty-one shillings. The authors were asked to observe three requirements: they should broadly survey all the statistical information in the chosen field, unofficial as well as official, they should call attention pitfalls in interpretation, and they should give references enable a student follow up the subject if he wished. The table of contents is as follows: