Thanks for the summary. I may get this book.

You can defeat automatic list formatting if your source code looks like this:

4\. Species counterpoint##
5\. Simple species##
6\. Combined species

except with spaces instead of "#" (to prevent the list items from being wrapped into one paragraph). Edit: If the list items have blank lines between them, the trailing spaces are not necessary.

(The creator of the Markdown format says "At some point in the future, Markdown may support starting ordered lists at an arbitrary number.")