Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced.
Illustrations in this eBook have been positioned between paragraphs and outside quotations. In versions of this eBook that support hyperlinks, the page references in the List of Illustrations lead to the corresponding illustrations.
The first illustration in each chapter was used as the first letter of the first word (an "illustrated drop-cap") in the original book, but are shown separately in the eReader versions of this eBook. The HTML version of this eBook shows them as they appeared in the original printed book.
In some of the original illustrations, details, particularly words, were unreadable, and the image quality of a few originals was significantly worse than the others.
The HTML version of this eBook can display larger versions of some of the “Plan” diagrams found at the end of the book, but, when this eBook was prepared, the .mobi and .epub versions did not support those larger sizes.
The index was not checked for proper alphabetization or correct page references.
Text uses both “lodestone” and “loadstone”, “a side” and “aside”.