A full colour map, based on a digitised OS map of Beverley of about 1908, with its medieval, Georgian and Victorian past overlain and important buildings picked out. Beverley is one of England's most attractive towns with two of the country's greatest medieval parish churches, the Minster and St Mary's, and a wealth of Georgian buildings. The medieval town had three main foci: to the south the Minster, the probable origin of the town in the Saxon period, with Wednesday Market; to the north Saturday Market and St Mary's church; and to the south-east a port at the head of the canalised Beverley Beck linking to the River Hull. In the 14th century the town was one of the most populous and prosperous in Britain. This prosperity came from the cloth trade, tanning and brickmaking as well as the markets and fairs, and the many pilgrims who flocked to the shrine of St John of Beverley. By the end of the Middle Ages, the town was in decline, not helped by the dissolution of the great collegiate Minster church in 1548. Beverley's fortunes revived in the 18th century when it became the administrative capital of the East Riding of Yorkshire and a thriving social centre. The gentry, who came here for the Quarter Sessions and other gatherings together with their families, patronised the racecourse, assembly rooms, theatre and tree-lined promenade. It was they and the growing number of professionals who built the large Georgian houses, often set in extensive grounds, many of which survive. In contrast the townscape and economy of Victorian Beverley was dominated by several thriving industries, notably tanning, the manufacture of agricultural machinery and shipbuilding. The map's cover has a short introduction to the town's history, and on the reverse an illustrated and comprehensive gazetteer of Beverley's main sites of historic interest.

Various endogenous and environmental challenges of homoiostasis have resulted in the evolution of apparently quite different mechanisms for the same or similar functions in individual representatives of the animal kingdom. One of the prominent achievements of comparative physiology over the last few decades has been the description of regula- tory features common to many studied species beyond the extreme diversity of their morphological forms. Delineation offunctional princi- ples universally applicable to the physiology and biochemistry of living systems became often possible through technical advances in the devel- opment of numerous new techniques, in many cases modified and adopted from other fields of science, but also by approaching certain problems using multifactorial analysis. The advance in technology has facilitated studies of minute functional details of mechanisms, which finally lead to better understanding of generally similar functions, covered by the multiple developments of Nature as a response to an extreme variety of different conditions. Improved understanding of specific mechanisms, however, has presented new problems at the level of system integration. The importance of the integrative aspect became particularly apparent during an international symposium on 'Mecha- nisms of Systemic Regulation in Lower Vertebrates: Respiration, Circu- lation, Ion Transfer and Metabolism' (organized in 1990 by Norbert Heisler and Johannes Piiper at the Max-Planck-Institut fUr experimen- telle Medizin at Gottingen/Germany).