Smithsonian Handbooks are the most visually appealing guides on the natural world in the book marketplace. Featuring more than 500 full-color illustrations and photographs, along with detailed annotations, Smithsonian Handbooks make identification easy and accurate.

Reviews

With crisp illustrations and graphic presentations characteristic of Dorling Kindersley book design, these identification guides differ somewhat from other standard field guides by using a narrowing-down process that moves through several stages to identify specimens based upon such observable characteristics as shape, color, range, and so forth. Each book opens with a short section on how to collect and classify specimens. These chapters review tools, discuss collecting ``ethics,'' and describe procedures for documenting a collection. The bulk of each handbook consists of illustrated entries summarizing facts about the particular specimen. For minerals and rocks, entries list facts such as composition, group type, descriptions of how the material is formed, chemical or physical composition, and how the material's hardness or chemistry can be tested. The shell handbook identifies the organism by family and species, indicates habitat and geographic distribution, and gives typical dimension. Moths and butterflies are identified by family and species, habitat, time of day when usually in flight, and typical size. Each entry contains a full-color illustration. Butterflies and Moths occasionally offers pictures of both male and female when the species show significant differences in markings between sexes. Public libraries should find that these handsome volumes are worth adding to their collections of field identification guides. They may even want to purchase two sets: the hardcover for their reference collection and the flexibound for their circulating collection.-- Laurie Tynan, Montgomery Cty.-Norristown P.L., Pa.