enager (nth-hand; I am not really as old as all that!)
and have greatly enjoyed the enlightened, yet practical and
down-to-earth attitude of the writer. It seems to me a fine example of
late Victorian instructional material of the unpretentious persuasion.
Some of Browne's views were ahead of his time in terms of compassion
and conservation, so I urge modern readers not to sneer at what they
see as his out-of-date interest in "stuffed animals". Nor should they
take too patronising an attitude to Browne's long paragraphs and
occasionally strained concordances; he was not a professional writer
and he produced a fine, readable, and useful work. Both to the
biologist and historian of science, the book remains useful to this
day, and, as books of that period disappear for good, I hope, in
scanning it, to prevent a sorry loss to our generation and to those
who follow us. Though I nowhere edited his wording or punctuation in
any other way, no matter how much self-control this occasionally
demanded, I did split a lot of paragraphs, especially when they
spanned pages and thereby confused lines of thought.

In transcribing this book I have generally kept as truly to the
original as I could, including when Browne's (or possibly his editors')
conventions for the use of quotes and parentheses set my teeth on
edge. However, for lack of convenient font characters and sophistication
of scanning software, I have converted most of the vulgar fractions to
decimals. The others I have represented with slashes, so that say,
a value of one third might appear as 1/3. Similarly, I have split
ligatured characters such as the ligatured "ae" and "oe" frequent
in late Latin in particular. Also, following a practical and common
convention, I have replaced the umlaut with a following letter "e".
Thus "Moeller" becomes "Moeller".

Browne frequently cross-referred readers to pages in the book. As
pages got changed in scanning and editing, I have changed such page
references mainly to chapters or similar references.

There were several places where changes (generally advances, I hope!)
in technical biology, or possibly slips that Browne made in matters
outside his speciality, led to errors. I have not corrected these in
the text of course, nor do I discuss many of them. After all, most
readers who can recognise the errors in modern terms do not need my
assistance in correcting them, and to the other readers they would
hardly matter. Here however are