Preface to the Third Edition

These preparations, with those noted in the Preface to the Third Edition, cover a considerable proportion of the standard synthetic reactions. Most of these preparations come towards the end of Part II Preparations), and both elementary and advanced students should have no difficulty in selecting the preparative work they require. 

I sincerely hope that also this "fourth" edition of "PROPERTIES OF POLYMERS" will find (following the preface to the third edition) "a good acceptance in the polymer world and that it will prove a useful guide and aid to many users", notwithstanding that the present author is not the well-known Prof. D.W. van Krevelen, but somebody who attended many of his various lectures on "PROPERTIES OF POLYMERS" at Delft University of Technology. 

In the Preface to the Third Edition of his Regular Polytopes [20], the great geometer H. S. M. Coxeter calls attention to the icosahe-dral structure of a boron compound in which twelve boron atoms are arranged like the vertices of an icosahedron. It had been widely believed that there would be no inanimate occurrence of an icosahedron, or of a regular dodecahedron either. 

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