Preface

The text has mostly been preserved in its original form, including inconsistent italics, capitalisation, hyphenation and diacritics; however, some infelicities have been corrected silently, e.g. missing/inconsistent punctuation, parentheses and spacing. Several footnote markers have been inserted where they were missing from the text. The very long table of contents has somewhat inconsistent levels of indentation that don’t correspond accurately with headings used in the text. Some illustrations have been moved nearer to the relevant text and their locations may differ from those specified in the list of illustrations. A few illustrations that lacked an identifying number have been correctly numbered. The book contains extensive sections of quoted text but these are identified by square brackets rather than by traditional quotation marks. Several short passages of text were inserted by the printer at the last minute, and these are enclosed in lightly shaded text boxes. Two different sized fonts were used to print the original body text, a feature that is replicated in this e-transcription.

A list of spelling corrections and inconsistencies is appended at the end of the book.

The cover image of the book was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.