The survey for 1954 is again extremely late. A differential of five years is much too large for any survey or abstract book. The volume is somewhat smaller than its predecessors and also has more contributing editors, so that future editions should really be published sooner after the year surveyed has been completed.
The major criticism of the survey is the length of each of the so-called abstracts. Too much detail is included, and much of it is unnecessary for the reader to get the gist of the paper. The analytic papers themselves are so filled with details, and often extraneous discussions, that one would expect from a survey a contrary succinctness and brevity.
In the second place, the survey contains repetitive material. Articles are abstracted and books are mentioned in several sections by different members of the editorial staff. This repetitiveness is not helpful, even though there may