The favourable reception of Workshop Receipts by the scientific public during the last twenty years has been most satisfactory to the Publishers, as it has proved to them that the book is a valuable and useful one.

But during this time much additional information has come to hand, many improvements have been made in the Arts, new processes have been invented notably in Photography, and the general progress of twenty years has made much of the matter in the original book obsolete.

The present edition has been carefully revised and brought up to date, and it is hoped that the high reputation gained by the first edition will be maintained by the second.

Workshop Receipts has been compiled with three purposes in view: to serve as a note-book to the small manufacturer; to supply the intelligent workman with information required to conduct a process, foreign perhaps to his habitual labour, but which it is necessary to practise at the time; and to impart to the scientific amateur a knowledge of many processes in the arts, trades and manufactures, which will, it is hoped, render his pursuits the more instructive and remunerative.

The novice would do well to remember that it is the individual skill of the workman in performing many apparently simple operations that renders those operations successful, and that this skill is Only obtained through long practice or natural ability. A pre-eminently superior manipulator resembles a poet in that he is "born, not made "; when therefore a receipt is tried for the first time and is not thoroughly successful, the experimentalist should consider, eve he condemns the receipt, how far his own inexperience has contributed to the failure.

Care has been exercised in cases where the practical operation connected with a receipt has been apart from the writer's experience, to have it verified by authority, and the aim throughout has been to render Workshop Receipts a reliable handbook for all interested in Technological pursuits.

E.. & F. N. SPON.

January 1895.