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The British naval officer George Francis Lyon (1795–1832) survived extremes of African heat and Arctic cold during his colourful career. Remembered chiefly for the engaging journals he kept, and for his watercolours of the Arctic, he was fascinated by the indigenous peoples of the lands he explored, notably being tattooed by Inuit and eating raw caribou and seal meat with them. In 1826 he sailed to Mexico, then recovering from its war of independence, to serve as a commissioner for an English mining company. His vivid and often entertaining two-volume account of his experiences was published in 1828. In Volume 1, Lyon complains of his first nights being disturbed by 'dogs, pigs and restless cocks', and on his way to the mining area of Zacatecas he visits a church where a figure of Christ made him recall a 'creation of Frankenstein'.
An industrious journalist and editor of periodicals, Peter Lund Simmonds (1814–97) wrote across a range of subjects, including natural history and applied science. An active member of the Royal Society of Arts, he first published this dictionary in 1858. Reissued here in its revised and enlarged edition of 1867, it contains more than 22,000 entries. The curious can discover within that a calcar is a furnace in a glassworks, or that the best kind of Cuban tobacco is known as calidad. Readers will also learn that the hautboy can be either eaten or played, being the name for both a wild strawberry and a form of oboe. Testifying to the proliferation of manufactured goods in the nineteenth century, and the contemporary desire to diffuse 'sound and useful knowledge among the masses', this work will appeal to readers interested in the history and lexicon of trade and technology.