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...