CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED BY C. J. CLAY, M.A. AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.
Transcriber’s Notes
Whewell published the first edition of the Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences in 1840 in two volumes, as a companion to the 1837 History of the Inductive Sciences. Revised second editions of both works appeared in 1847. The third editions saw a major reshaping of the Philosophy: a two volume History of Scientific Ideas (1858 – in Project Gutenberg as #69093), Novum Organon Renovatum (1858 – the present text, relying upon resources kindly provided by the Internet Archive), and On the Philosophy of Discovery: chapters historical and critical (1860 – long since in Project Gutenberg’s collection: #5155). (The third edition of the History of the Inductive Sciences is available in PG as #68693.)
Adaptations in this text
In the present text footnotes are numbered by Book and are placed after the paragraph to which they attach; in the original, notes were numbered by chapter. Page numbers appear in colour; where a word was hyphenated across pages the number has been placed before the word. Fractions have been transcribed as numerator ⁄ denominator; the original usually has numerator over a line with denominator below.
Some unusual symbols occur. On pages [357] and 358, there are italic letters with a number written above them. On two occasions B has a 1 above it, and once C has ½ above it. On page [364] a formula is written with two entries containing H on a line above Cl. These superpositions have all been transcribed by superscripting the first and subscripting the second item (with the result that the letters are printed smaller than in the original). The other oddities have been captured in Unicode.
On pages [152] and [197] Whewell uses a raised dot as a decimal point and in footnote [26] of Book III. a comma. These have been replaced by a mid dot.
Inductive Charts
At the end of Book II. ([p. 140]), Whewell included two very large inserts, described in some detail in the Book itself. They were not captured by the scans available in the Internet Archive. I was kindly provided with photographs of them. Those charts were four times as wide as the normal page and a quarter as long. In the html version they have been fairly accurately represented via tables; but with up to 25 columns these tables will be very difficult to decipher on small screens. In the text version, coded structure diagrams have been used, which again utilise the full 70 spaces Project Gutenberg allows.