When Did J. E. Purkinje First Use the Term Protoplasm?*

CHRONOLOGY OF THE MODERN WORLD: 1763 TO THE PRESENT TIME compiled by Neville Williams. 923 pages. McKay. $12.50.

This book works as a compendium to comparative campy information, indispensable to Trivia players. Thus:

He (at a cocktail party): Did you know that in the same year Sigmund Freud wrote The Psychology of Everyday Life--1901--the Trans-Siberian Railway reached Port Arthur, W. Normann discovered the process for hardening liquid fats, the British Academy was founded, Walt Disney was born, and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec died?

She: My word, no. But it reminds me of 1874. Imagine! W. E. Gladstone attacked papal infallibility in his pamphlet, The Vatican Decrees, Solomon introduced the pressure-cooking method for canning foods, Richard Wagner completed Goetterddmmerung, and Wingfield invented lawn tennis. And, oh yes--civil marriage was made compulsory in Germany.

There are 30,000 such "irresistible" facts in this guide to "the events and achievements in every walk of life of the past two centuries." British Historian Neville Williams, 43, marshals his towering topics as well as his trivia very neatly. On the left-hand pages, political and international events are listed year by year, month by month; on the right-hand pages are achievements in the arts, sciences and everything else.

Mir Understatement. Still, there is the occasional feeling that something is missing. To begin with, the first space for January 1763 is completely blank. This could be an example of British understatement. Or, judging by what Williams chooses to include in his listings for, say, July 1763--"Mir Kasim of Murshidabad, defeated by Thomas Adams and deposed, takes refuge in Oudh"--it may simply be a case of rushing an unfinished manuscript into print.

Well, face it: 1763 was a very dull year anyway. It hardly holds a candle to 1924, for example. That's when insecticide was introduced; Juan Gris lectured at the Sorbonne; Bloch wrote his piano quintet; Gershwin, Rhapsody in Blue; Puccini, Turandot; Schoenberg, Erwartung; Forster, A Passage to India; Galsworthy, The White Monkey; Shaw, St. Joan; Mann, The Magic Mountain. It was also the year that Woodrow Wilson and Lenin died, that Hitler got out of prison, Coolidge was elected President, China, Britain and France recognized the U.S.S.R., Churchill became Chancellor of the Exchequer, and, as everyone no doubt recalls, the Turks put down the revolting Kurds.

Editorial Economy. In the preface to his chronology of practically everything, Williams explains that he accumulated a stack of index slips that ran to 30 feet. Nobody can argue with his facts. What does seem regrettable is that he sometimes slights American achievements. Consider "Sport" in 1938: "Len Hutton scores 364 runs against Australia at the Oval Test Match (Aug.)." It would have only been cricket to add a separate-but-equal note reading: "Gabby Hartnett hits home run in the last of the ninth to give Chicago Cubs chance to win National League pennant (Sept.)."

Williams' view of what is significant is also at times open to question. He lists Karl Marx in 1847 for his attack against P. J. Proudhon in The Poverty of Philosophy. Marx makes the chronology again in 1848, when he and Engels issued the Communist Manifesto. But Williams ignores the real turning point in Marx's life--1862, the year that the New York Daily Tribune fired Foreign Correspondent Marx in an economy move. If not for that editorial misjudgment, Marx might have remained on the staff and kept so busy that he would not have had the chance to go around preaching revolution.

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