Content area
Full Text
Environ Earth Sci (2015) 73:919922 DOI 10.1007/s12665-014-3726-3
REVIEWS ON BOOKS AND MEDIA
Howden N, Mather J (eds): History of hydrogeology
Peiyue Li
Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014
2013, CRC Press, Taylor & Francis Group, 424 pp, Hardback ISBN 978-0-415-63062-7 USD 125.95, GBP81.00, eBook ISBN 978-0-203-07134-2 USD 88.17
History provides a window through which the rise and decline of any aspect of the society can be seen. For scientists and practitioners in geosciences, especially for students, it is useful to look back over the historical development of their science, to share international experiences and to learn from the history of another discipline. Various eminent hydrogeologists from different countries have contributed to History of Hydrogeology (Fig. 1) and clearly achieve these goals.
History of Hydrogeology, edited by Nicholas Howden and John Mather, was published by CRC Press in November of 2012 (however, the copyright year is 2013). Previous to this, another book entitled 200 Years of British Hydrogeology edited by J.D. Mather had already been published by the Geological Society of London in 2004. There are also some journal articles discussing the history of hydrogeology from a country or continent perspective, such as Erdlyi (1965), Maxey (1979), Parker (1986), Narasimhan (2005) and Zhou et al. (2011). This new book, however, goes beyond the aforementioned ones by spanning a broader geographical and historical range in a country-specic manner, and thus is more international and useful to experts and students in relevant elds. The book contains 131 black-and-white gures and is organized into 21 chapters. At the end of each chapter, there is a helpful
reference list. This book is potentially useful for hydrogeologists, environmentalists, hydrologists, geologists and anyone who is interested in hydrogeology.
Chapter 1 is an introductory chapter in which the editor-in-chief of this IAH book series, Nick S. Robins, introduces
Fig. 1 Book cover of history of hydrogeology CRC Press, Taylor & Francis Group
P. Li (&)
School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Changan University, No. 126 Yanta Road, Xian 710054, China e-mail: [email protected]
123
920 Environ Earth Sci (2015) 73:919922
the initiative of carrying out the History of the Hydrogeology Project and how he conceived the idea to edit the volume in order to make the project more complete. The rst gure in this introductory chapter...