The first edition of this book (1958) described an analytical situation which had existed for a number of years for maintaining quality control on vulcanizates of natural rubber although the situation had recently been disturbed by the introduction of a range of synthetic rubbers which required identification and quantitative estimation. For the former purpose 'wet' chemistry, based on various imperfectly understood organic reactions, was pressed into service. Alongside this was the first introduction of instrumental analysis, using the infrared spectra of either the polymers or, more...