In 1966, following the Ninth International Cancer Congress in Tokyo, the Commission on Epidemiology and Prevention of the International Union against Cancer formed a new Committee on Cancer Incidence. This Committee met in Lausanne in May 1968 and decided that the monograph on Cancer Incidence in Five Continents, which had been published by the UICC tw~ years previously, had been so useful that a second volume should be published as soon as a suf­ ficient amount of new material could be collected. The Committee delegated the responsibility for the production of this volume to the Editors of the original monograph and to the Honorary Secretary of the Committee, Dr C. S. Muir. Mr P. Payne, however, was unable to continue in this capacity because of the pressure of other commitments. The Editors have 1eant heavily on the skills and knowledge of Dr A. J. Tuyns and Dr H. Tu1inius, who have been responsible for the preparation of Chapters II and IV respectively and for the collection of a large part of the material presented in them. They are also greatly indebted to Miss J~ Powell of the Birmingham Cancer Registry, who wrote the computer programme for calcu­ lating the age-specific and standardized incidence rates, in conjunction with Dr J. A. H. Waterhouse, and supervised the operation of the computer, as well as to Mme J.