I was also obliged from time
to time to throw off by travel the effects of overwork.
The variety of residence and occupation arising from
these causes may perhaps explain some peculiarities in this
book which might otherwise puzzle my reader.
While these journeyings have enabled me to collect materials
over a very wide range--in the New World, from
Quebec to Santo Domingo and from Boston to Mexico,
San Francisco, and Seattle, and in the Old World from
Trondhjem to Cairo and from St. Petersburg to Palermo--
they have often obliged me to write under circumstances
not very favorable: sometimes on an Atlantic steamer,
sometimes on a Nile boat, and not only in my own library
at Cornell, but in those of Berlin, Helsingfors, Munich,
Florence, and the British Museum. This fact will explain to the
benevolent reader not only the citation of different editions
of the same authority in different chapters, but some
iterations which in the steady quiet of my own library would
not have been made.
It has been my constant endeavour to write for the general
reader, avoiding scholastic and technical terms as much as
possible and stating the truth simply as it presents itself to me.
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