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THE NEW YORK

PUBLIC LIBRARY
365659A

ASTOR, LENOX AND
TILDEN FOUNDATIONS
R 1928 L

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1845, by.

THOMAS BALDWIN,

in the clerk's office of the District Court of the United States, in and for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

B: M. DUSEN BERY, STEREOTYPER.

e. SHERMAN, PRINTER.

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ADVERTISEMENT TO THE THIRD EDITION.

ENCOURAGED by the extraordinary marks of favour with which the first and second editions of the UNIVERSAL PRONOUNCING GAZETTEER have been received, the authors have spared no pains nor expense in order to render the present edition still more worthy of the public patronage. They have carefully revised the whole work, and made a number of corrections, which, though for the most part minute to appearance, they cannot but regard as important in a work of this kind; because, if the period allotted to education is too short, as all will admit, to learn what is really useful, surely no time or labour should be wasted in acquiring erroneous habits or ideas, which can only be corrected afterwards by an additional and perhaps far greater expenditure of time and labour.*

An Appendix has also been added, containing more than ten thousand additional names, comprising all the small towns, rivers, &c., in the United States; the cities, villages, and counties of Texas, besides a great number of places in Mexico and California, to which our existing relations with those countries give at the present time great interest and importance.

It may be observed that we have rarely given in the Appendix the pronunciation of the names of places in the United States, partly because a large portion of them can readily be pronounced by any one who knows how to read, and the insertion of the pronunciation in these cases would often materially interfere with that condensation and brevity at which we have so studiously aimed; and partly on account of the inherent difficulty of the subject, there being frequently no settled pronunciation of the names of places even among the inhabitants themselves. This is perhaps necessarily the case when the

It may not be improper here to call the attention of our readers to the great advantage possessed by a stereotype work, from the facilities it affords for attaining absolute accuracy. All persons who have any acquaintance with the subject must be aware of the difficulty or rather impossibility of printing any work which shall at first be entirely free from typographical errors. This difficulty is greatly increased in a book like the present, in which many signs and figures are employed to mark the pronunciation. In a stereotype work the errors may be corrected in the plates as they are discovered, while those parts which are already correct remain undisturbed. In this way any conceivable degree of accuracy may be gradually attained.

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vi

ADVERTISEMENT TO THE THIRD EDITION.

name is of foreign origin (e. g. TERRE HAUTE) and the inhabitants are of different nations or from different sections of the country; as then some will probably conform to the foreign pronunciation, while others will adopt various modes of anglicizing it. We believe that the determining of such questions must be left to time, which will doubtless gradually bring about the same uniformity in the pronunciation of those names as now obtains in the pronunciation of the names and words adopted into the English language at the Norman conquest.

In the Gazetteer, which frequently contained articles of some length, and in which a great many figured vowels and other marks were necessary in order to indicate the pronunciation of the more difficult names, a very small type would have been extremely inconvenient, not to say inadmissible; but there being in the Appendix little occasion to use any such marks, type of a small size has been employed. By this means, and by having recourse to some additional abbreviations, we have generally been able to condense the notice of the smaller places into a single line; so that, without greatly increasing the size of the work, there has been a most important and extensive addition to its matter.

These, and other considerations already alluded to (see note on the preceding page), will, it is hoped, be deemed a sufficient apology for having recourse to an appendix, which, if an evil, is almost an unavoidable one in works describing a country so full of changes as ours.

Let the inquirer bear in mind that all the more important places, including the towns of 6,000 inhabitants and upwards, and all the counties (except those of Texas), are noticed in the body of the work; but that the small towns, rivers, post villages, post townships, the counties of Texas, the different Mexican states and towns (except a few of the largest), are given in the Appendix. In a few instances, where some of the most important of the small towns are described in the Gazetteer, the name is inserted in the Appendix, with a reference to the body of the work.

We would particularly invite the attention of teachers to the Table at the end of the Introduction, exhibiting the diversity which prevails in the mode of writing geographical names;-and likewise to the explanations and remarks on pages 50, 51 and 52, as a perusal of these is indispensable to a correct and full understanding of the plan of the work.

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