XIV PKEFACB. 



pages. Much of the current squeamishness arises from want 

 of familiarity with the thing itself ; many persons, who would 

 shrink from writing Gothe, are horrified at the sight of 

 fuer for fiir ; they are used to the French mode of printing 

 Gcethe, and to seeing the Cajsar of their school-days written out 

 Caesar, hut they lack the courage of following these indications 

 to their logical consequences. Originally these modified vowels, 

 a, 6, ii, were shown, not by the diaeresis, but by a small e 

 written above the principal letter ; the mode adopted in this 

 volume is therefore merely a common-sense practice, and also 

 one which is gaining ground every day. 



Titles given in italics are translations or transliterations from 

 Russ, Greek, and other languages not using the Roman letters ; 

 my objection to printiag the titles in their original characters 

 was, that the authors' names would not range in the single 

 index proposed; a multiplicity of indexes, one for each lan- 

 guage, being an unmitigated nuisance. The transliteration of 

 Russian names is not easy, as we find sometimes the same man 

 or place differently rendered ; for instance, Kieff, Kiew, Kiev ; 

 or Wjatka, Wiatka, Yiatka. In many cases the transliteration 

 is done by German- speaking people, and where this is known 

 and accepted generally, it is cited by me, thus Maximowicz 

 instead of Maximovitch, as it would be rendered into English 

 equivalents. 



As far as it was possible, I have adhered to the names of the 

 authors as used in their own vernacular. The unwarrantable 

 and indefensible translation of proper names cannot be too 

 severely censured or unsparingly put down. This vicious taint 

 seems to be most strongly developed in the French and German 

 languages, so much so, that when their writers try to break 

 away from their bad traditions they appear to be unable to free 



