Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced.
Illustrations in this eBook have been positioned between paragraphs. In versions of this eBook that support hyperlinks, the page references in the List of Illustrations lead to the corresponding illustrations.
“Allesandro Volta” was printed that way.