Translator's Note

Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert (1780 to 1860), physician and naturalist, wrote this book while he was head of the Realschule at Nuremberg; his preface is dated there on 17 April 1814, and the book was printed that year at Bamberg by C. F. Kunz. It runs to 204 pages, with a leaf of corrections at the end.

This translation is made from the page images of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek’s copy (shelfmark Ph.sp. 766), scanned by the library’s digitization centre and mirrored on the Internet Archive. The German was read from the images; the scan’s machine-read text was used only to find places, and a second scan of the 1814 printing, made by Google from a copy whose library is not named, was used as a check where a word was hard to read. Someone has entered a few of the printed corrections in pencil in the Munich copy; the translation follows the printed list, not the pencil. Every correction in Schubert’s own list, headed “Verbesserungen”, has been carried into the text, and the list itself is translated at the end, where alone the page and line numbers of 1814 are kept, since without them it would point nowhere.

The English keeps Schubert’s seven numbered sections and his paragraphs as he printed them. Each heading is given in English and then as Schubert printed it. His own footnotes stay beside the paragraph that carries them, with the marks he gave them (*, **, *a) and so on). Words he set in spaced type are in italics, and his dashes are given as commas, colons or parentheses. His Greek is kept in Greek letters. Once he sends the reader back to a page of his own book; the reference is given here as a link to the passage. The page numbers of 1814 are not reproduced.

The text is translated without modern commentary. A few notes, marked with a dagger and a roman numeral and gathered at the end, place a name or a book the reader could not otherwise place, and each says where its information comes from.