Transcriber’s notes:

In this transcription a black dotted underline indicates a hyperlinkto a page, illustration or footnote; hyperlinks are also marked by aquahighlighting when the mouse pointer hovers over them. A red dashedunderline indicates the presence of a comment that can be revealed byhovering the mouse pointer over the underlined text. Page numbers areshown in the right margin.

The text contains uncommon typographic characters that will notnecessarily display correctly with all browsers. If some of thecharacters look abnormal, first ensure that your browser’s ‘characterencoding’ is set to Unicode (UTF-8). You might also need to change thebrowser’s default font to one of the less common fonts such as ArialUnicode MS, DejaVu, FreeSerif, or Segoe UI Symbol.

The text contains many numeric fractions, some of which areindistinct and the accuracy of their transcription cannot beguaranteed.

Errors and inconsistencies:
Punctuation anomalies have been corrected silently (e.g. missingperiods, commas and semicolons, incorrect or missing quotation marks,unpaired parentheses).

Unambiguous typographic errors have been corrected silently in thebody of the text, but are listedat the end of the transcription.

Inconsistent spellings such as those below have not been altered:
chrystals/crystals
chrystallized/crystallized
table-spoonful/tablespoonful
tea-spoonful/teaspoonful
casters/castors.

Archaic spellings have not been altered, e.g. River Platte, drouth(drought), maleable, inclosed.

Several redundant duplications of the words ‘the’ and ‘to’ have beendeleted.

An omitted word (‘way’) has been inserted as [way], and severalmissing degree symbols have been inserted silently.

Index entries are not in strict alphabetic sequence.

Headings and captions do not have consistent styles (font,punctuation).

A brief Table of Contents has been added by the transcriber toassist readers.