Encyclopaedia Britannica

“ Art and Industry When you think of your home, making a picture in your mind of the familiar surroundings associated in your memory with your greatest pleasures, you are really thinking of furniture. Tradition makes the dwelling itself the tangible symbol of home, because when a primitive tribe ceased to be wanderers, the walls that excluded wild beasts and inclement weather and gave privacy were conspicuous evidences of a change for the better. But in our higher civilization our way of thinking has changed. ”

“ The Development of Style No writer can consider the use he will make of the tools of his trade—and the Britannica is certainly the chief among them—unless he has very definite views as to the particular kind of work he is trying to do. Where writing is regarded as a business, the art of writing is the art of being read, and the art of being read lies, nowadays, in convincing the reader that you have something fresh to say, rather than in arousing his admiration of your way of saying it. ”

“ The impossibility of accomplishing, without the use of printing, all that the Britannica does, will present itself very forcibly to your mind, in another aspect, if you try to imagine 1,500 separate audiences, assembled each day to listen to lectures by the 1,500 contributors to the book. Any attempt to imagine the Britannica doing its work in any way but the way in which it does makes you realize, too, that if it were not for modern methods of spreading knowledge, there would be no such system of assembling and co-ordinating knowledge as finds its fullest development in the Britannica. ”

“ CHEMISTRY We have traveled far since Chemistry had as its simple basis four elements: fire, air, water, and earth, regarded as perfect and complete since they embody every essence of which a body was supposedly capable: for fire was hot and dry; air, hot and wet; water, cold and wet; earth, cold and dry. We have outlived the belief in the philosopher’s stone which animated the Middle Ages. ”

“ Both the leather merchant and the public would be delighted to hear some of the curious things that the Britannica tells about leather, which is, from any point of view, one of the most interesting of all commodities; although few of those who use it, and perhaps as few of those who deal in it, ever stop to think how curious a relation there is between the original nature of the material and the qualities of the finished product. In cattle and sheep, the hide is a garment that covers every part of the body but the feet. ”

“ It is, of course, a favorite pastime of parents to send a child to school primed with some question “to ask Teacher,” selecting an enigma that has been for centuries a battle-ground for scholars or scientists. And, apart from these malicious pitfalls, children themselves seem, quite innocently, to hit upon questions of extraordinary difficulty. A rebuff, a careless response, or, worst of all, an ingenious evasion of the issue, is fatal to the teacher’s authority and influence. ”

“ If you turn over the pages of this guide, and ask yourself, as you glance at the chapters, in what departments of general knowledge you are weakest, you will see what courses of reading will do most to make you an “evened up” man, without any weak threads in your intellectual texture. And, whatever you read, do not forget that the Britannica is a book of reference as well as for reading: that you are debasing your mind every time you leave unanswered any question that comes up in the course of the day’s work or talk, or while you are reading your newspaper. ”

“ Writing is none the less one of the fine arts: the modern writer must form his style with the utmost care, and always guard himself against the temptation to relax his standards. But the juggling with words, the “rhythmical sequences of recurring consonants,” the musical prose in which sounds are adjusted as artfully as in verse, presuppose readers to whom these elaborations are delightful. Such readers are rare, to-day. ”

“ A curious illustration of the general disregard of the subject is supplied by the fact—as true of the United States as of England, Germany or France—that representative government is, in practice, chiefly government by lawyers, and that in this age of machinery it is the exception to find in the cabinet which directs the affairs of any country, a single member who has any knowledge of mechanics. The same ignorance is conspicuous in newspaper offices. Even the most dignified dailies seem unable to deal with any news that has to do with machinery without making ridiculous blunders. ”

“ It is not only true that no ordinary library would supply the information to be found in the Britannica, but it is as true, and as relevant, that no ordinary library presents information in a form as stimulating to the writer who uses books as the tools of his trade. The editor-in-chief of the Britannica had all the world’s greatest experts in all fields of human knowledge and endeavour to choose from. ”

“ The corrective for any vagueness of ideas about psychology is best found in the article Psychology (Vol. 22, p. 547) by Professor James Ward, whose articles for the Britannica have been reprinted and used as text-books in schools and colleges all over the country. Put in a few words, the lesson of psychology is that the senses, sensations, thoughts and feelings, which, even when they are our own, we too often speak of as if they were things apart and independent, are subject to certain natural laws in much the same way as are the forces treated by the science of physics. ”

“ If the schools of the Middle Ages could truly call all the arts and sciences hand-maids and helpers to Theology, much more truly, in the present age, should the minister, in order that he may minister truly, know not merely the history of the Bible and of the Church, the results of modern criticism, and of comparative religion and folk-lore, but, almost as fully, general history, literature, philosophy, psychology, education, something of the fine arts, much of law and political science, and still more of social science and economics. ”

“ In no age was the spirit of satire so generally diffused as in the 19th century, but many of its eminent writers, while bordering on the domains of satire, escape the definition of satirist. The term cannot be properly applied to Dickens, the keen observer of the oddities of human life; or to George Eliot, the critic of its emptiness when not inspired by a worthy purpose; or to Balzac, the painter of French society; or to Trollope, the mirror of the middle classes of England. If Sartor Resartus could be regarded as a satire, Carlyle would rank among the first of satirists ”

“ As the Britannica article on Education indicates, the true value of education (not simply school education, but all education) lies as much in the influence which intelligently directed study exerts upon the mind as in the immediate usefulness of the information acquired, and the articles in the Britannica not only supply the most recent and authoritative information, but are so logically arranged, one dove-tailing into another, that they give the reader precisely that orderly view of knowledge which is the foundation of all mental training. ”

“ SEE ALSO CHAPTER II, FOR STOCK-RAISERS, CHAPTER III, FOR DAIRY FARMERS Every farmer in the United States knows that farming is to-day an industry which calls for study of the world’s agricultural products, processes, and markets as well as for scientific knowledge of soils, crops, and animals. Fifty years ago the farmer sold for consumption in his immediate neighborhood the small surplus of his crops that was not needed for his own household and live stock. To-day he competes, in all the world’s great markets, with all the world’s farmers, and is the chief among American exporters. ”

“ For all that known dialects prove to the contrary, on the one hand, there may have been one primitive language, from which the descendant languages have varied so widely, that neither their words nor their formation now indicate their unity in long past ages, while, on the other hand, the primitive tongues of mankind may have been numerous, and the extreme unlikeness of such languages as Basque, Chinese, Peruvian, Hottentot and Sanskrit may arise from absolute independence of origin. The language spoken by any tribe or nation is not of itself absolute evidence as to its race-affinities. ”

“ Shadwell’s remarks on the relation of alcoholism to heredity may remind us that the very word “heredity” would seem strange to the typical man of a century ago, whose return to life we have imagined. We should be no more shocked by the occasional crudeness of his intimate and excited phraseology than he would be at our frankness in discussing even in mixed company such subjects as birth, reproduction, sexual morality, the social evil and the white slave trade. The growth of interest in these topics may be traced in part to Darwin, Huxley and Mendel, to what they did to make biology a science. ”

“ The earliest migrations of the human race, as definitely as the comparatively recent development of America, Australasia and the interior of Africa, were based upon an agricultural impetus. And his reading upon other subjects in the Encyclopædia Britannica will often remind him that the wool and cotton and linen and leather that we wear, the carpets and blankets and sheets in our houses, all originated in farming of one kind or another; while every food that nourishes us, save fish and game, is directly an agricultural product. ”

“ HISTORY, INTRODUCTORY AND GENERAL When you turn to the new Britannica to study history, you naturally expect to learn a great deal that will be new to you. But you can anticipate something more and better than that. You will find a great deal that is new to everyone, even to those who have been reading history for years. For the contributors to the work, in making a completely fresh survey of the whole field of human knowledge, were helping one another to obtain new light upon the history of even the earliest periods. ”

“ The article Crime (Vol. 7, p. 447) is full of interesting statistics and facts. It tells us that “the growth of criminals is greatly stimulated where people are badly fed, morally and physically unhealthy, infected with any forms of disease and vice,” and after proving by the records of various countries that men everywhere are more addicted to crime than are women, ends with this statement: “It has been well said that women are less criminal according to the figures, because when a woman wants a crime committed she can generally find a man to do it for her.” ”

“ But there is another and an even greater advantage in this kind of reading: it will take your mind out-of-doors during hours of leisure that you are compelled to spend in-doors. Everyone recognizes that out-door recreations, involving some degree of bodily activity, are the most wholesome for men whose work is sedentary, as is the case with nearly every reader of this Guide, and the best forms of out-door recreation are those in which the contrast with your work is accentuated by the complete change of scene and of habits which most men can only hope to get once a year, at vacation time. ”