The birth of this monograph is partly due to the persistent efforts of the General Editor, Dr. Klaus Timmerhaus, to persuade the authors that they encapsulate their forty or fifty years of struggle with the thermal properties of materials into a book before they either expired or became totally senile. We recognize his wisdom in wanting a monograph which includes the closely linked properties of heat capacity and thermal expansion, to which we have added a little 'cement' in the form of elastic moduli. There seems to be a dearth of practitioners in these areas, particularly among physics...