Smashups:The Hazards of Travel offers an intriguing iconography of travel accidents of all genres-air, highway, railway, and water-wrecks involving trucks, buses, cars, light planes, jetliners, seaplanes, freight trains, and ships. There are also European wrecks, Asian wrecks, American wrecks, minor crashes, major ones, horse and cart wrecks, freak accidents, and even ordinary ones. With over 180 photographs, most never-before published in America and many of historical, national, and international importance, you can now experience the thrill of danger in the safety of your own home.

American railroad history is filled with accounts of misadventure. Steam boilers blew up. Bridges collapsed under the weight of heavy engines. Locomotives crashed head-on because of signal failures. Passenger cars derailed, often with dire results. Lightly built wooden coaches splintered on impact, and the debris often ignited from the coals in the iron stoves used for heating. In the mid-nineteenth century American railroading was burgeoning--a growth too fast for safe operations. Despite the grim statistics of 19th and early 20th century train wrecks that resulted, one cannot help but find the photographs and public prints of the day interesting. When you pick up this wonderous book, you will have a hard time putting it down

One of the privileges of appointment to a Chair at another University is that it gives one the right to talk to many distinguished people about their work and ideas. E. B. Ford was known to me before I came to Oxford as the author of a book on butterflies and as somewhat of an eccentric, but I was quite unprepared for the welcome he gave me into the Department of Zoology and for the enormous interest of the subject which he gradually revealed to me. My contact with the Genetics Laboratory was made easier by one of the first things I had to do. Within a few weeks of my arrival, it came to light that a new building for another department was to be erected on a piece of land, known to us as 'Henry's weed garden' but generally regarded as being derelict. Even my, at that time, elementary, knowledge of ecological genetics made it easy to realize that the population of caterpillars that had been under continuous observation there for eleven years put it in a rather special category of wilderness; although I did not succeed in saving it, I was able to persuade the university to substitute another experimental plot and this may have helped the geneticists to appreciate that the new professor was not only interested in electrical apparatus.