FOUNDED ON ASTRONOMICAL OBSERVATIONS, AND TRIGONOMETRICAL AND BAROMETRICAL MEASUREMENTS. TRANSLATED FROM THE ORIGINAL FRENCH BY JOHN BLACK. VOL. III. LONDON: PRINTED FOR LONGMAN, hurst, rees, ORME, AND BROWN, PATERNOSTER-ROW; · AND H. COLBURN, CONDUIT STREET. .1. ADVERTISEMENT. THE conclusion of Humboldt's Political Essay on New Spain is now laid before the Public. The Translator in these concluding volumes has continued to convert the weights, measures, and coins of the original, into those used in England, with all the accuracy in his power; but he has cautiously and perhaps prudently abstained from taking notice of any seeming oversight or inconsistency of M. de Humboldt, occurring to him in the course of translation. It is hardly possible for a Translator of the most obtuse intellect not occasionally to perceive a vulnerable point in his original; and what the present Translator perceives or imagines he perceives, he is at no time very willing to keep locked up from others; but whether from his former notes being intrinsically without merit, or from its being expected that so humble a being as a Translator, should steer at as great a distance as possible from the higher parts of authorconfesses ship, the Translator candidly that the reception of these notes so far as he has had occasion to learn, was not such as to induce him to resumse the office of Commentator. From an idea that the weights used in the original, where the contrary was not expressly stated, were French, the Translator uniformly considered marcs to mean marcs of France; and it was not till near the end of the third volume, he discovered that the author meant marcs of Castille, which are to the French as 541 to 576: the conversions of marcs therefore as far as page 394 of the third volume are all in a slight degree erroneous, and to be reduced to accuracy require to be multiplied by .93923. |