Volume V of the Scientific Papers of C.V. Raman contains the papers published by Raman on various aspects of crystal dynamics. The volume also contains a new view of the theory of elasticity developed by Raman and Viswanathan in which the symmetries of the stress and strain tensors and the number of independent elastic constraints differed from the standard view.

This volume contains 55 publications in the field of Acoustics and includes the famous landmark paper On the Mechanical Theory of Vibration of Bowed Strings--perhaps the most important contribution to the theory of violins since Helmholtz, and also the English translation of Raman's celebrated monograph, Musik instrumente und ihre Klange (Musical Instruments and Their Tones) in the Springer Encyclopaedia of Physics. The volume includes six remarkable papers on the acoustics of Indian musical instruments--the mridangam and tabla, the only percussion instruments in the world that produce harmonic vibrations, and the tanpura and veena.

To C.V. Raman color was an obsession. The visual impact that the blue of the Mediterranean had on him culminated in his discovery of the Raman effect. This volume contains 79 papers he published on a variety of topics, 39 of which deal with color in Nature. All the optical phenomena in his repertoire were necessary to explain the flashing rainbow colors of the plumage of birds. 16 papers deal with diamonds: The beauty of their geometric form, and their lustrous curved faces bring out clearly that many specimens exhibit a symmetry lower than the highest in the cubic class. Twenty papers deal with miscellaneous topics in which Raman was interested from time to time. His phenomenological theory of viscosity which was so useful to the polymer chemist, his classic studies of impact between two bodies, and his pioneering work of the mechanism on fracture of solids are all dealt with in this volume.

Volume VI of the Scientific Papers of C.V. Raman contains the work Raman did in the last decade of his life. It also contains the charming monograph he wrote entitled the Physiology of Vision. Raman brings out the important point that the characteristics of human vision that play an important role in the perception of color are as important in deciding a quality of a gem or a mineral as its optical properties. A simple method is given by which one could actually view one's own retina and explore its behavior under various spectral excitations. Raman studies in detail the remarkable but not too widely known faculty of the unaided eye to recognize polarized light and also locate its plane of polarization. Raman investigates the incredible power of the eye to discriminate colors differing by as little as 10 angstroms. The book is full of simple experiments in wavelength which can be set up and that illustrate many unforeseen aspects of the perception of light and color.