Transcriber’s notes:

In this transcription a black dotted underline indicates the presenceof a hyperlink to a specific page or illustration; hyperlinks are alsoindicated by teal highlighting when the mouse pointer hovers over them.A red dashed underline indicates the presence of a transcriber’scomment; hovering the mouse pointer over such underlined text willreveal the comment. Page numbers are shown in the right margin.

The text contains numerous inconsistencies involving spelling,hyphenation, punctuation, and other aspects. Some of the spellingvariations possibly represent authentic contemporary alternatives whileothers may be attributable to the variety of languages occurring in thebook – English, Italian, German, Spanish, Danish, Swedish, Dutch,French, Portuguese and possibly others.

Spelling inconsistencies that are clearly typos have been correctedwhere appropriate but those representing alternative spellings have beenleft unchanged. A list of corrections and common inconsistencies isappended at the end of the book.

Punctuation anomalies have been corrected silently (e.g. missingperiods, commas and semicolons, incorrect or missing quotation marks,unpaired parentheses), particularly in the extensive bibliographiclists, in the index and in the Figure captions.

There is significant inconsistency between the headings displayedin the Table of Contents (TOC) and those in the text, most noticeablyin Book II where the last four entries in the TOC are appropriatelyidentified as Sections II, III, IV, and V but the corresponding headingsin the text are incorrectly named as Section II Part I, Part II,Part III and Part IV. TOC headings and text headings also vary intheir specific wording and the presence or absence of parentheses anddashes.

Inconsistent ways of expressing measurements are as in the original,for example, one fifth of an inch, 1/5th of an inch, 1/5 of an inch,1/5″ of an inch, 1/5″.

The dimensions of many organisms are described using an archaicunit of length: the ‘line’ which was equivalent to 1/12 ofan inch. However, as the inch itself varied, both within and betweencountries, it was a non-standard measurement, e.g. in England one linewas equivalent to 2.117 mm but the French (Paris) ligne was equalto 2.256 mm. The triple prime symbol ‴ was used to represent theunit and occasionally appears in this text (along with the more common′ and ″ symbols representing feet and inches). The ligne unit is stillused by watchmakers.

The closing pages of the book contain advertising material aboutother works from the same publisher. In some cases the date ofpublication could not be determined with certainty because of theinferior quality of the page scans.