Original spelling and grammar have been generally retained, with some exceptions noted below. Original printed page numbers are shown like this: {52}. Footnotes have been relabeled 1–46, and moved from within paragraphs to nearby locations between paragraphs. The transcriber produced the cover image and hereby assigns it to the public domain. Original page images are available from archive.org—search for “suppressedplates00laya”.

The List of Illustrations contains two divisions, those that were printed upon numbered pages, and those that were printed on unnumbered pages. Most illus­tra­tions originally printed inside paragraphs of text have been moved to nearby locations between paragraphs, and the corresponding page numbers have been removed as necessary to maintain proper order of the remaining page numbers. Captions of Illustrations were sometimes altered to conform more closely—in substance or in typography—to the titles in the List of Illustrations (LOI). In such cases, the original captions (if any) are nevertheless retained as part of the image. On page 172, a caption was inserted where none had been printed, to match the LOI.

The illustrations all appeared to the transcriber to have been grayscale when initially published, but had naturally aged to a yellowed antique white background. Illustrations have been edited with primary intent to preserve the original image, but changed to grayscale, with secondary motives to improve brightness and contrast, and to improve readability of small or faint text. The illustrations in the epub and mobi editions must be severely restricted in size. Some of the illustrations in this book are so large and detailed that the size restrictions significantly degrade the quality of the images. Therefore some, for example two illustrations originally between pages 88 and 89, have been divided into two or three fragments for the epub/mobi editions. Each fragment was (perhaps) individually edited for brightness and contrast to improve the readability of any text. The illustrations originally on pages 71 and 234 regretfully remain quite poor in quality in the epub/mobi editions. Separate detail images showing much of the text portions of these two illustrations at better quality have been provided for the epub/mobi editions. Several of the illustrations have been rotated to achieve better quality in the epub/mobi editions while adhering to the image size restrictions.

Page 10. “protoype” to “prototype”.

Page 212. “fireband” to “firebrand”.

Page 254. “Whistler, James M‘N” to “Whistler, James M’N”.