With 26 Illustrations.
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- Although I worked from material in good condition, scanning and preparing subject matter of this type is much harder work than preparing a novel or the like, so obviously I should never have bothered with preparing this book if I had not though it to be worthwhile. In fact I consider it to be very rewarding, informative, and entertaining. I hope you also find it rewarding, and I present it in much the same mood that I assume it was written in: not that it is fully correct or definitive, but that both the material and the lines of thought that the book comprises, are useful, thoughtful, and enjoyable, taken for what they are worth. The book certainly is based on a formidable level of erudition, however cheerful the author’s style may be.
- For the most part I have tried to remain true to the source, but this is not an attempt to reproduce the volume I scanned; my objective was to render its content available. Accordingly, I did not hesitate to correct minor, obvious errors, or to adopt my preferences for spacing and the like. Also, the means that I employed in preparing this material did not lend themselves satisfactorily to preservation of the original pagination or of numbering and cross reference of pages. However, as the product is machine readable, search is easier than working from an index, and I tried to support the use of such facilities. Anyone who feels strongly that an index remains necessary, is welcome to add an index to the version that I have presented here, without crediting me for the body of the work.
- I have however, substituted cross-reference between sections or chapters for the (now meaningless) cross-references between pages. Also, like many books of that day, the original had many page headings such as "MYTHICAL ETYMOLOGIES" or "HILL AND DALE", without incorporating them in the table of contents or the text, or even making it clear just where those page headings fitted into the text. I have changed such page headings to sub-headings within the text, where they are more useful, given that they no longer are necessary for the original purpose of aiding the process of flipping through the pages of a paper book.
- I have relocated footnotes from the feet of the pages to just after the text that they qualified. Apart from thereby rendering the text less dependent of changes of format, this arguably renders the footnotes more useful and less disruptive to the reader. Footnotes are marked as such, so as to avoid confusion.
- I have of course tried to produce as clean a product as possible, but I apologetically assure you that some errors remain in the text. You accordingly must treat the content with appropriate caution.