In this transcription a black dotted underline indicates a hyperlinkto a page, illustration or footnote; hyperlinks are also indicated byaqua highlighting when the mouse pointer hovers over them. A red dashedunderline indicates the presence of a concealed comment that can berevealed by hovering the mouse pointer over the underlined text. Pagenumbers are shown in the right margin. Footnotes are located at the endof the book.
The cover image of the book wascreated by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
Potential problems:
The text contains numerous foreign and uncommon typographic characters.In addition to Greek, there are passages of Hebrew and Arabic text(which read from right-to-left and are normally right justified) thatwill not necessarily display correctly with all browsers. If somecharacters look abnormal, first ensure that the browser’s ‘characterencoding’ is set to Unicode (UTF-8). You might also need to change thedefault font. Standard fonts such as Times New Roman, Georgia or LucidaSans Unicode are sometimes adequate, but it might be necessary to usea less-common font such as Arial Unicode MS, DejaVu, Segoe UI Symbolor FreeSerif to see all characters correctly. Right alignment of theHebrew and Arabic paragraphs will generally only be apparent with amonospaced font such as DejaVuSansMono.
Some diacritics don’t display consistently with all fonts and allbrowsers. For example, the Greek letter υ̑ occurs in several words andwith some browsers and fonts the inverted breve is displaced towardsthe following letter (as might be the case here); the same anomalyoccurs with macrons above letters in some old English words. The Hebrewpassage contains several letters with single or double overhead dots(of uncertain significance) that can’t be replicated on screen – thepassage is hyperlinked to an image of the original for anyone wishingto see it.
Roman numerals are widely used and often in archaic ways. Numeralsfollowed by an italicised l, s, or d indicate monetary valuesin imperial pounds shillings and pence units, e.g. xxxiiil. vis.viiid. represents 33 pounds 6 shillings 8 pence (a space sometimesseparates the numeral from the unit). The last ‘i’ (‘one’) in a romannumeral was often represented by the letter ‘j’; hence iiijd isequivalent to 4 pence, and ‘ij holownesses’ should be read as ‘twoholownesses’.
Numerous portions of text enclosed within square brackets were insertedby the author (not the transcriber) for clarification or translation,as were several (sic) entries in the Hebrew and Arabic texts.
The index has many references to both page numbers and footnotenumbers, e.g. 24 n. (a single unnumbered footnote on p. 24), 93 n. 3,126 nn. 4, 5, (pages containing multiple footnotes), and also tonumbered figures and plates. The original footnote numbering beganafresh at 1. on each page, but in this transcription footnotes arenumbered sequentially from the beginning of the book and the numbersno longer correspond to those shown in the index. Readers can locatea given indexed footnote by following the page hyperlink and countingthrough to the appropriate footnote marker on that page. Figure andplate references have been hyperlinked to the actual illustrationsrather than to the original page numbers because many illustrationshave been moved from their original position to be closer to therelevant text discussion.
Errors and inconsistencies:
Punctuation anomalies have been corrected silently (e.g. missingperiods, commas and semicolons,