The objectives for initiating publication of a new review journal as stated in volume 1 of this series of World Reviews is as follows:
We hope to provide a forum for more lengthy and discursive reviews than published in conventional journals, and we hope that these reviews will not be a catalogue of the papers published in the last few years... We hope it will bear the imprint of the author himself, that is to say his interpretation, his views and his theorizing will be welcomed as an integral part of his article.
To a large extent this objective has been realized in this volume, but the nine papers, written by as many authors, are a curious mixture of undocumented opinion, the historical record that can be found in textbooks, and a genuine effort to evaluate critically an area of learning about which much is known but for which interrelationships