First Paragraph
Earlier this year, Carl Wunsch noted that it was exactly fifty years since The Oceans, subtitled “Their Physics, Chemistry, and General Biology” had been published by Prentice-Hall, Inc., and he proposed to me that Oceanography commission a review of that famous text. I thought that this was a superb idea, and found several colleagues who were enthusiastically ready to look at the book that has served so many oceanographers.