About the Cover Illustration

The figure on the cover of Metaprogramming in .NET is captioned a “Man from Japodes.” The Japodes, also called Lapydes or Giapidi, were an ancient people who dwelt north of and inland from Liburnia, a region on the northeastern Adriatic coast in what is now Croatia. This illustration is taken from a recent reprint of Balthasar Hacquet’s Images and Descriptions of Southwestern and Eastern Wenda, Illyrians, and Slavs published by the Ethnographic Museum in Split, Croatia, in 2008. Hacquet (1739–1815) was an Austrian physician and scientist who spent many years studying the botany, geology, and ethnography of many parts of the Austrian Empire, as well as the Veneto, the Julian Alps, and the western Balkans, inhabited in the past by peoples of many different tribes and nationalities. Hand-drawn illustrations accompany the many scientific papers and books that Hacquet published.