Transcribers’ Notes
Text contains Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and astronomical symbols. Equipment that cannot display these characters may substitute question marks or other placeholders.
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed. Words spelled differently in quoted text than elsewhere were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were silently corrected, except as noted below; ambiguous unbalanced quotation marks and hyphens at the ends of lines were retained.
Text often uses periods where commas might be expected. As the author’s intent is unknown, all of them have been retained.
In some cases, it was not possible to distinguish between the letter “l.” and the number “1.”, usually in footnotes, and usually followed by a period.
The spelling and accent marks of non-English words have been retained as printed in the original book; some possible or likely errors are noted below, but not comprehensively.
Footnotes, originally at the bottom of the page, have been renumbered and moved to the end of each chapter. The footnotes to a footnote retain their original letter-identifications.
Index references not checked for accuracy. Links to pages in Volume I may not be supported by some devices. When they are supported, the first use of such a link within a session may lead to the eBook at Project Gutenberg, but not to the page. Subsequent uses of any of those links should lead to the specific page.
Text uses both “lye” and “ley”; both retained.
Text uses both “Duhamel” and “Du Hamel”; both retained.
[Frontispiece]: The artist’s initials actually were “J. J.”
Page [19]: “give then in return” was printed that way.
Footnote [67], referenced on page [26]: contains an extra closing quotation mark or is missing an opening one.
Page [35]: “βοτρυίτις” is a typographical error for “βοτρυΐτις”.
Footnote [119], referenced on page [50]: “Greek names” was misprinted as “games”; changed here.
Page [57]: “interpretators” was printed that way.
Page [196]: “one of the principle is the art” was printed that way.
The footnotes within footnote [524] do not include return links because several of them are referenced more than once.
Page [300]: “אדות שכער” is a typographical error for “אדרת שנער”.
Page [300]: “אדרת שעו” probably is a typographical error for “אדרת שער”.
Page [317]: One “vech” in “vech, veh, vech,” probably is a misprint for “veeh”.
Page [353]: “μόνα γἀρ” is a typographical error for “μόνα γὰρ”.
Page [423]: “January 1569” was printed as “January 1659” and has been changed here, based on the dates earlier in the same sentence.
Page [448]: “scarcely ten” and “54½ died” were printed that way.
Page [451]: Some of the Roman Numerals were overlined in the original; those overlines may not be shown on some reading devices. In the same paragraph, “55 5 55” was printed with the digits sideways.
Page [468]: “ἂλλον” is a typographical error for “ἄλλον”.
Page [478]: “Περσικός” is a typographical error for “Περσικὸς”.
Footnote [1219], referenced on page [495], references “Soap” in vol. i., but it's actually in this volume.
[Volume I] of this set is available at no charge from Project Gutenberg, [www.gutenberg.org], eBook number 48151.