As 1 review these pages, the last of them written in Summer 1978, some retrospec­ tive thoughts come to mind which put the whole business into better perspective for me and might aid the prospective reader in choosing how to approach this volume. The most conspicuous thought in my mind at present is the diversity of wholly independent explorations that came upon phase singularities, in one guise or another, during the past decade. My efforts to gather the published literature during the last phases of actually writing a whole book about them were almost equally divided between libraries of Biology, Chemistry, Engineering, Mathematics, Medicine, and Physics. A lot of what 1 call "gathering " was done somewhat in anticipation in the form of cönjecture, query, and prediction based on analogy between developments in different fields. The consequence throughout 1979 was that our long-suffering publisher re­ peatedly had to replace such material by citation of unexpected flurries of papers giving substantive demonstration. 1 trust that the authors of these many excellent reports, and especially of those I only found too late, will forgive the brevity of allusion I feIt compelled to observe in these substitutions. A residue of loose ends is largely collected in the index under "QUERIES. " It is c1ear to me already that the materials I began to gather several years ago represented only the first flickering of what turns out to be a substantial conflagration.

Inhalt

1. Circular Logic.- 2. Phase Singularities (Screwy Results of Circular Logic).- 3. The Rules of the Ring.- 4. Ring Populations.- 5. Getting off the Ring.- 6. Attracting Cycles and Isochrons.- 7. Measuring the Trajectories of a Circadian Clock.- 8. Populations of Attractor Cycle Oscillators.- 9. Excitable Kinetics and Excitable Media.- 10. The Varieties of Phaseless Experience: In Which the Geometrical Orderliness of Rhythmic Organization Breaks Down in Diverse Ways.- 11. The Firefly Machine.- 12. Energy Metabolism in Cells.- 13. The Malonic Acid Reagent ("Sodium Geometrate").- 14. Electrical Rhythmicity and Excitability in Cell Membranes.- 15. The Aggregation of Slime Mold Amoebae.- 16. Growth and Regeneration.- 17. Arthropod Cuticle.- 18. Pattern Formation in the Fungi.- 19. Orcadian Rhythms in General.- 20. The Circadian Clocks of Insect Eclosion.- 21. The Flower of Kalanchoe.- 22. The Cell Mitotic Cycle.- 23. The Female Cycle.- References.- Index of Names.- Index of Subjects.