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ASTOR, LENOX AND TILDEN FOUNDATIONS 1916

1916

PREFACE.

THE Ancients boasted of their SEVEN WONDERS of the WORLD, but this work will prove that the Moderns may boast of their HUNDRED WONDERS.

To embody these wonders, whether of nature, or of art, and to bring them into a comprehensive form, from the different stores in which they may be said to have been hitherto locked up, has been the aim of the editor of these pages. They are here drawn into light, and exhibited at a single view, presenting whatever is most striking in the creation, and whatever the genius and in

dustry of man have been able to effect, in order to excite admiration at the sublimity of his conceptions, the depth of his scientific researches, and the grandeur of those structures, many of which have subsisted, almost unimpaired, for a long succession of ages, in testimony of his consummate skill, which could thus achieve monuments, at once so splendid, and of so imperishable a nature!

Those marvellous relations which the mischievous fancy of travellers has too often imposed on the credulity of the weak, as well as the fables founded in bigotry, which were received as truths in the dark ages, have been sedulously shunned where the subjects treated have incidentally led to them, they have, on the other hand, been as carefully ex

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