Originaltextes dar. Lediglich in Detailfragen wurde sie uberarbeitet oder korrigiert, insbesondere wenn neuere Ergebnisse der Forschung dies notwendig erscheinen liessen."

Since the first French edition of the book emphasized rather the solid facts of Cosmology than the detailed discussions of controversial results, relatively few revisions were necessary for the English edition. They were made early in 1979 and affected about 5% of the text. The main revisions referred to the distance scale, the dlstribution of galaxies, the X-ray observations of clusters, the cosmic time evolution of quasars and radiogalaxies and the 3 K radiation. A new short bibliography presents the recent articles and the latest proceedings of Symposia; from these the reader can easily...

Symposium No. 73 of the International Astronomical Union was devoted to the obser vational and theoretical aspects of close binary stars. Just over 100 participants attended. The Local Organizing Committee would like to thank the following: IAU for travel grants. IBM United Kingdom Ltd for very generous support in the form of travel grants. The Royal Society for the provision of travel grants to participants from Eastern Europe. We also thank the Director of the Institute of Astronomy, and our colleagues and research students for their moral support and assistance. Finally we thank Pauline...