About the Book
The World's Encyclopedia of Wonders and Curiosities set out to hold everything remarkable at once: anatomy and astronomy, botany and geology, mythology and meteorology, biography and natural history — “a full and authentic description of the most remarkable and astonishing places, beings, and events.”
Its organising idea is the running head. Page after page is filed under Curiosities Respecting Man, Respecting Fishes, Respecting the Sea, Respecting Mines and Ruins and Ice — a Victorian filing cabinet of the astonishing, browsable by exactly those categories here.
Some of its wonders are sober science, some are travellers' tales reported at face value, and its accounts of other peoples belong squarely to their era; where the text carries period language it is left exactly as printed, with an editor's note.
This digital edition is built from a dual-engine OCR of all 1,118 pages, reconciled page by page, with the original engravings.