Produced by Karl Pfeifer <karl.pfeifer@usask.ca>.
*Ebook Editor's Prefatory Note*
Wherever the original text uses letterspacing for emphasis, I have substituted enclosing understrikes; I have, however, kept the German-style quotation marks (although in some plain text character sets the right-side quotation mark does not appear as the proper stylistic complement of the left-side quotation mark).
The only spelling errors I spotted are "Jnhalt" for "Inhalt" on p. 14 (although capital "I" and "J" are sometimes conflated or not conspicuously distinguished in German blackletter typefaces, Hecker's book is not set in such a typeface), "lehhaft" for "lebhaft" on p. 20, and "deselbeu" for "deselben" on p. 75. Otherwise, the spelling, though not always consistent, seems to employ what were acceptable variants at the time of writing.
I have neither corrected Hecker's spelling or attempted to make it consistent, nor have I made other corrections to the original text. In particular, I have retained Hecker's idiosyncratic use of the long dash throughout; sometimes his long dash functions like genuine punctuation, but oftentimes its purpose is difficult to discern (e.g. he sometimes uses it at the end of a paragraph after the period). I have also retained Hecker's idiosyncratic use of doubled double-quotes for a quotation within a quotation on p. 68. And at the bottom of p. 31, there is a left-side parenthesis mark without a matching right-side parenthesis mark.
Hecker misquotes Aristotle on pages 19 and 52, each time omitting the connective "kai" from Aristotle's phrase "anôdunon kai ou phthartikon" (Poetics 1449a). The transliterations in this ebook are mine; Hecker himself quotes Aristotle in Greek.
Karl Pfeifer University of Saskatchewan <karl.pfeifer@usask.ca>
[Page I]
Die
*Physiologie und Psychologie*
des
*Lachens und des Komischen.*
Ein Beitrag zur experimentellen Psychologie
für
Naturforscher, Philosophen und gebildete Laien.
Von
*Dr. Ewald Hecker,*
Zweitem Arzt an der Anstalt für Nerven- und Gemütskranke in Görlitz.