Transcriber’s notes:

Several volunteers have worked on the post-processing of this complex e-book and I acknowledge the efforts of those who preceded me with respect to correcting spelling and other errors. A limited list of such corrections is appended. The original presentation of the book was not entirely consistent in the formating of headings, subheadings, etc. and cannot be truly replicated for digital reading devices, but the textual content has been faithfully preserved including inconsistent punctuation and other flaws. The original table of contents, which was located at the end of the book, was incomplete and inconsistent with respect to the hierarchy of headings. It has been modified to be of of greater assistance to the reader and has been repositioned to the more usual location at the beginning. Some illustrations have been moved nearer to the relevant text. Footnotes have been numbered and collated as endnotes that follow the comprehensive index. In this transcription a black underline indicates a hyperlink to a page, illustration or footnote.

The cover image of the book was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.