Minor errors in punctuation and formatting have been silently corrected. Please see the transcriber’s note at the end of this text for details regarding the handling of any textual issues encountered during its preparation.

Page headers signalled changes of topic, and have been retained as paragraph descriptions (‘sidenotes’). Where the headers persist across multiple pages, they were removed. On occasion, the headers on facing pages are interleaved during an extended discussion of a topic. Only the first of each were retained.

The position of illustrations may have been adjusted slightly. The page references to them in the Table of Contents are linked to the actual position of each. Each plate is linked to a larger image to facilitate inspection of the details.

Captions for the Plates which appear within the images have been repeated as text to facilitate searches. Where no captions were given, or the images are composites (e.g. Plate III), the descriptions used in the Table of Contents were used.

The alphabetic footnotes in the original restarted with ‘a’ and cycled through the alphabet multiple times. Several notes to tables used the typical asterisk and dagger symbols. All footnotes have been re-sequenced numerically for uniqueness.

Footnotes, some of which are quite lengthy digressions, have been moved to the end of the text and linked to facilitate navigation.