Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; occasional unbalanced quotation marks retained.

Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained.

Index not checked for proper alphabetization or correct page references.

Decimal alignment in tables uses a space character (here:). Display devices that do not support that character may substitute a question mark or other symbol.

To make the Map of South America more readable, Transcriber has segmented it into four quadrants. Those segments appear immediately after the original map.