In this transcription a black dotted underline indicates a hyperlink to a page, illustration or footnote; hyperlinks are also marked by aqua highlighting when the mouse pointer hovers over them. A red dashed underline indicates the presence of a comment that can be revealed by hovering the mouse pointer over the underlined text. Page numbers are shown in the right margin.
The text contains uncommon typographic characters that will not necessarily display correctly with all browsers. If some of the characters look abnormal, first ensure that your browser’s ‘character encoding’ is set to Unicode (UTF-8). You might also need to change the browser’s default font to one of the less common fonts such as Arial Unicode MS, DejaVu, FreeSerif, or Segoe UI Symbol.
The text contains many numeric fractions, some of which are indistinct and the accuracy of their transcription cannot be guaranteed.
Errors and inconsistencies:
Punctuation anomalies have been corrected silently (e.g. missing periods, commas and semicolons, incorrect or missing quotation marks, unpaired parentheses).
Unambiguous typographic errors have been corrected silently in the body of the text, but are [listed] at 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 been deleted.
An omitted word (‘way’) has been inserted as [way], and several missing degree symbols have been inserted silently.