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The omniscient flavour of the title, not to mention the writer's name and the fact that he accepted the Chair of Applied Geophysics at Münster University, Westphalia, in 1938, may tend to prejudice English-speaking readers against this book. It should, however, be remembered that the author is a physicist of world repute, a pupil of Max Planck (to whose memory the volume is dedicated) with about seventy publications to his credit not only in geophysics but in other fields such as biochemistry and plant physiology. For a man of such ability and experience to try to provide 'The real Background to Nature', and a firm foundation for the structure of the natural sciences, may be ambitious, but it is a natural outcome of a strong philosophical bent in a scientifically trained and well provisioned mind. The author's argument is too closely knit to broach in a short notice and the book will have too little appeal to clinicians to justify a long review in this journal. It will nevertheless be of considerable interest to any psycho-analysts who are intrigued with the inter-relationships of the sciences and with what is usually called the philosophy of science.