Duke-Elder's special talent was in summarizing a great jumble of information into a single smoothly written, helpful paragraph; his astonishingly retentive memory and his encyclopedic output allowed him to stand like a Colossus astride the middle 40 years of the ophthalmic century. A gold mine of information on the ophthalmic basic sciences. It will always have value because of the author's fascination with the history of his specialty.