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A NOTE ON THE TEXT

The text of this edition of Sketches of the History of Man is based on the posthumous third edition of 1788. The third edition was published in four volumes. Sketches, however, comprises three “Books”: Progress of Men Independent of Society, Progress of Men in Society, and Progress of Sciences. The three-volume format of the present edition is meant to reflect the work’s fundamental principle of structuring. Page breaks in the third edition are indicated in the body of the text by the use of angle brackets. (For example, page 112 begins after <112>.) Substantive differences between the first, second, and third editions are noted in order to give the reader a sense of how energetically Kames continued to work on the book right up until the end of his life. In places where the first edition differs significantly from subsequent editions, the relevant passage from the first edition, with its volume and page number, is supplied in a note. A fully annotated text of Sketches would be the work of many years. Kames was a conspicuous consumer of references and allusions, even by the standards of his day, and Sketches is a particular showpiece in this regard. Accordingly, an exhaustive annotation would seriously clutter the text, and I have settled for much less.

Supplementary notes to Kames’s own footnotes are enclosed in double square brackets. For fuller information, a bibliography is provided, indicating the complete title, author, place of publication, and date of as many of the works cited by Kames (or Thomas Reid) as it has been possible to identify. The reader should bear in mind that in cases where it is unclear which of an author’s works is being cited, the bibliography is necessarily somewhat speculative. Very familiar and easily identified works (such as those by Euripides, Sophocles, Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, and Shakespeare) have not been included. Where a modern translation has been quoted in a supplementary footnote, the translation used is indicated in parentheses after the entry in the bibliography. Where an original text was in a modern language other than English or French, a contemporary translation is given as well. Obvious typographical errors in the text have been corrected without comment.