Transcriber’s notes:

Small viewing devices might not display this e-book correctlybecause of the complexity of the text, its length, and the presencewithin it of some uncommon typographic characters. It is best viewed ona large screen with character encoding set to Unicode (UTF-8).

The text has mostly been preserved in its original form, includinginconsistent italics, capitalisation, hyphenation and diacritics;however, some infelicities have been corrected silently, e.g.missing/inconsistent punctuation, parentheses and spacing. Severalfootnote markers have been inserted where they were missing from thetext. The very long table of contents has somewhat inconsistentlevels of indentation that don’t correspond accurately with headingsused in the text. Some illustrations have been moved nearer to therelevant text and their locations may differ from those specifiedin the list of illustrations. A few illustrations that lacked anidentifying number have been correctly numbered. The book containsextensive sections of quoted text but these are identified by squarebrackets rather than by traditional quotation marks. Several shortpassages of text were inserted by the printer at the last minute, andthese are enclosed in lightly shaded text boxes. Two different sizedfonts were used to print the original body text, a feature that isreplicated in this e-transcription.

A black underline indicates a hyperlink to a page, illustrationor footnote. A red dashed underline indicates the presenceof a concealed comment that can be viewed by hovering themouse pointer over the underlinedtext. Page numbers are shown in theright margin and footnotes are listed at the end. Footnotes are listed at the end.

Alist of spelling corrections andinconsistencies is appended at the end of the book.

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