J. Anat.
(2002) 201, pp527–529
Book reviews
Blackwell Science, Ltd
Craniofacial Development, Growth and Evolution. By
Murray C. Meikle. (Pp364; £95 hardback; 207 illustra-
tions; ISBN 0 9542338 0 8.) Diss, Norfolk: Bateson
Publishing. 2002.
A textbook on craniofacial biology is long overdue, and
this book represents a remarkable achievement. The
field is vast, and could have been approached and
organized in many different ways. Murray Meikle is
Professor of Orthodontics at Guy’s, King’s and St
Thomas’ Hospitals Medical and Dental School, and the
book emphasizes the author’s clinical dental context.
Indeed, the flyer enclosed in my review copy promotes
it as ‘the book orthodontists, plastic and maxillofacial
surgeons, otolaryngologists and paediatric dentists
have been waiting for.’ Although a clinical salary may
be necessary to afford ownership of a personal copy, this
book will be a useful resource for a much wider group,
including geneticists and basic scientists working in the
field of craniofacial development and anomalies.
The chapter headings summarize the book’s cover-
age: early craniofacial development, cell adhesion in
craniofacial morphogenesis, the biology of skeletal
tissues, development of the face, the pharynx and its
derivatives, the chondrocranium, the membranous
neurocranium, the nasomaxillary complex, the mandible,
development of the dentition. Chapter 2 was written
with a co-author, J. R. Sandy; it is mainly a tutorial/
review on adhesion molecules that is competently
written and beautifully illustrated but not well anchored
within the book as a whole. A much more concise intro-
duction to this material would have sufficed, with
further information in the sections where the relevance
of its inclusion is clear. Some of the molecules mentioned
in this chapter are never encountered again; Eph–
ephrin interactions, of major importance in the segre-
gation of neural crest cell populations, are omitted.
The other co-authored chapter, the membranous
neurocranium (with Robert D. Evans), is one of the
most successful chapters in the book, providing an
introduction to this topic easily accessible to 3rd year
science and medical undergraduates.
© Anatomical Society of Great Britain and Ireland 2002
Chapter 3 is a useful and well illustrated account of
cartilage and bone, though it is a pity that endo-
chondral ossification is described only for long bones.
The endochondral mammalian skull base is not well
covered in the book as a whole, though there is a nice
photomicrograph of the spheno-occipital synchon-
drosis in the chapter on the chondrocranium. I was
surprised to read in Chapter 3 that ‘skeletogenesis … is
always associated with an epithelium and a basement
membrane’. This is surely not true for the limb bones,
which develop from mesenchymal condensations and
are specifically excluded from the area close to the
surface ectoderm. In chapter 10, section 8.1, bone is
described as ‘the normal product of mesenchyme in
the absence of an inducer’; I don’t think this statement
is true either, though it may be valid for neural crest-
derived mesenchyme that has already undergone some
restriction of potential. These inconsistencies are a
product of the vast amount of literature that has been
surveyed for this book. No single author can be an
expert in all of the fields covered, but he should
perhaps not rely too trustingly on the validity of his
source material.
Because the first chapters of the book cover basic
craniofacial developmental biology, including accounts
of genetically modified mouse models, it was hard to
get a sense of the author’s own voice. But he comes
into his own in the last three chapters, which are
written with authority and personal involvement. In all
chapters, though, Meikle gives a historical context that
is informative and entertaining, though he comes close
to apologising for this in the Preface. I appreciated
the potted biographies of major historical figures at
the end of each chapter. In addition, there are historical
anecdotes embedded within the text that humanize
some of the factual data. We learn that acceptance
of the concept of neural crest was delayed by rigid
adherence to the germ layer theory. Criticism by the
Anatomical Society in 1920 delayed publication of
work reporting the neural crest cell origin of the first
arch mesenchyme by J. P. Hill and his research student
Katherine Watson until 1958, after Hill’s death in 1954
528 Book reviews
and the publication of Hörstadius’ monograph on the
neural crest in 1950. Julia Platt had similar problems
with her heretical 1883 publication demonstrating an
ectodermal origin of the mesenchyme that forms the
visceral arch cartilages and dentine – she failed to
obtain an academic position in the US or Europe and
‘turned to civic work’. I can’t help feeling that in the
late 19th century her discovery of the ‘mesectoderm’
(her term) might have been a convenient excuse for
excluding a pioneering woman from the academic
community.
The strengths of this book are its breadth of cover-
age (molecular genetics to morphometry) and the
time-scale of its literature sources (I loved the com-
ment, summing up the author’s view of the controversy
on the human premaxilla, ‘personally I’m with
Goethe’). The colour illustrations are a major feature,
and have strengths and weaknesses (given that there
are 207 of them, this is hardly surprising). Excellent
photographs from original papers and specimens
have been obtained through a large number of personal
contacts, and many illustrations redrawn in familiar
textbooks are refreshingly reproduced here from the
originals. Some of the drawings accompanying the
historical notes are stunning – did von Baer himself
make the beautiful drawings of chick development? The
weaknesses are largely in the redrawn diagrams, espe-
cially those showing individual cells: the single-layered
epithelia of early embryos are shown as double or
worse (the pseudostratified epithelium of the otic pit is
drawn as four-layered) and nowhere is the epithelial–
mesenchymal transition of the emigrating neural crest
properly illustrated. The solid colours used to illustrate
early morphogenetic events in chapter 1 are preferable
to the incorrect cellular detail of the same events
drawn by a different hand in chapter 2. The picture I
disliked the most, on the grounds of failure of com-
munication, is the diagram purporting to illustrate the
IHH–PTHrP interaction in the epiphsis of long bones – it
looks like a tube of differently coloured smarties rather
than differently shaped and clearly aligned cells. The
puzzled reader should turn the page to see the cellular
detail illustrated in a drawing first published in 1848.
The other weaknesses of the book are a product of
the complexity of the topic. The organization is not
always logical, and sometimes repetitive. Experimental
work on the skull vault is covered in the chapter on
the nasomaxillary complex instead of with the mem-
branous neurocranium; material on development and
growth of the mandible is spread between at least
three chapters, making it easy for readers specifically
looking for material on this topic to miss relevant informa-
tion that is not included in the chapter on the
mandible. These problems are partially overcome by the
excellence of the index. However, the repetition in part
derives from the multiplicity of sources, and there has
been little attempt to reconcile differences between
them. Inconsistencies include the bone differentiation
point made above; a 5th pharyngeal arch is listed in
Chapter 1, whereas the pharynx chapter explains the
reasons, based on homology, that there isn’t a 5th arch.
There is a similar inconsistency in the terminology, e.g.
premature closure of the cranial vault sutures is called
synostosis and stenosis in different parts of the text,
without explanation or correlation.
These weaknesses could no doubt have been ironed
out if Professor Meikle had spent another year on the
book, and only marginally detract from the major
achievement this work represents.
Gillian M. Morriss Kay
University of Oxford
Oral Anatomy, Histology and Embryology, 3rd edition.
By B. K. B. Berkovitz, G. R. Holland and B. J. Moxham.
(pp. xii + 378; fully illustrated in colour and black and
white; £44.99 paperback; ISBN 0 7234 3181 7.) Oxford:
Elsevier Science, 2002
As many readers of the Journal of Anatomy are aware,
the number of anatomy teachers is declining rapidly.
Unless they are directly concerned with provision of
dental courses, they may not be so conscious that the
shortage of expertise in the field of oral biology is even
more acute. Irrespective of the paucity of dedicated
teaching staff, oral biology is an absolute requirement
for dental students and still has to be taught. The
release of a new edition of this book is timely. It will
be an absolute godsend to those new to the subject as
well as bringing experienced oral biology teachers up
to date.
In previous incarnations, this book had the subtitle ‘A
colour atlas and textbook.’ It is still a comprehensive
atlas packed with about 900 colour photographs and
micrographs of excellent quality. They are drawn from
the authors’ own extensive collections and from those
of other teachers and researchers throughout the
dental world as well as from journal articles and reviews.
© Anatomical Society of Great Britain and Ireland 2002

The authors are generous with their acknowledge-
ments to these other sources. The new edition is, how-
ever, now more like a textbook than its predecessors
were. Formerly, the text was largely in the form of
extended figure legends. In the new edition, the text is
overt with reference to corresponding figures; the
extensive figure legends still retain their place where
they augment the text.
The book is well written with clear subheadings
providing comprehensive coverage of each topic. As well
as the expected descriptions of the chemical and phys-
ical properties, structure, function and development
of the dental and periodontal tissues, oral mucosa and
salivary glands, the book also covers relevant perioral
gross anatomy including the temporomandibular joint,
tooth morphology, occlusion of teeth and develop-
ment of the dentitions. In addition, the book starts
with a section on the in vivo appearance of the oral
cavity, a subject that receives scant coverage in other
texts covering the same areas. The atlas format lends
itself to this topic whereas the black and white illustra-
tions or line drawings, which publishers of low-volume
sale books dictate, cannot convey the appearance of
the living mouth so dramatically. For this section alone,
this book is worth reading by anyone who has to teach
medical students or other health science subjects
such as speech and language therapy students where
this information is just as important to their future
clinical practice. Other highlights are the photographs
of stunningly detailed dissections with nerves and blood
vessels coloured for clarity and the beautiful illustra-
tions of tooth pulp morphology where photographs of
sectioned teeth are paired with colour line drawings,
the clearest exposition of this topic I have come across.
Each chapter is completed by a section headed
‘Clinical considerations’. Although these summaries are
© Anatomical Society of Great Britain and Ireland 2002
Book reviews 529
useful, I would have preferred them to have been
integrated in the relevant context rather than tacked
on to each chapter. Dental students are as notorious as
their medical counterparts for their rapid acquisition
of the ‘Do we need to know this for the exams?’ syn-
drome. Integration would have reinforced the clinical
application of the contents rather than implying that
the clinical application was an afterthought.
There are one or two other imperfections in what is,
overall, an excellent product. Some of the teeth photo-
graphed from all angles to display their morphology
have incomplete roots; the experienced can spot this
immediately but as it is not explained in the accom-
panying legends, it could be confusing to the tyro. In
some of the electron micrographs, the labelling gets
lost against the background. This is nitpicking, but
I searched in vain for the arrows on Fig. 9.63, for
example. This was one of the few illustrations where I
did have difficulty, a remarkable achievement given
the profusion of pictures.
Multiple copies of ‘Berkovitz, Holland and Moxham’
should be on the library shelves of all dental schools
and a copy should sit resplendently on the desk of any
oral biology teacher; but will the students buy it? At
almost £45 it exceeds by 50% the publishers’ present
psychological barrier of £30 over which students will
think more than twice about buying a book. If students
view this book as a short-term means to an end then
they may feel it is too expensive (though one only
has to look at the quality to see why it costs as much
as it does), and they may not invest. If they look on
this book as a resource and reference for future
studies and clinical dental practice then it is worth
every penny.
Martin Atkinson
University of Sheffield