Encyclopædia

“ It is in the nature of a memorial of their literary work, but it will be found to contain no specimen extracts from their writings.
Everybody has heard of the Encyclopædists of France. Who are they? They are a group of men who, during the eighteenth century, associated themselves together for the production of a great work to be the repository of all human knowledge,—in one word, of an encyclopædia. ”

“ The Collections in Popular Literature will, therefore, embrace most of the features of an Encyclopædia, though the subjects will not be divided into fragments, or scattered over many volumes; each subject being treated with fulness and completeness, and its information brought up to the present time. ”

“ In the present work, we have preferably adopted the term "Encyclopædia," for reasons which the philological reader will easily discover. But upon the motive which have induced us to combine this word with the epithet "Domestic," we cannot in this place expatiate; as such an account will appear with more propriety in a future preface.
Many attempts have been made by writers, to reduce the whole circle of the arts and sciences to a systematic order, and exhibit a connected view of them, by representing what has emphatically been called "The Tree of Knowledge;" ”

“ THE word encyclopædia was first used by the Greeks, not for a book, but for a system of instruction in the whole circle of learning. Knowledge in their time was still so limited in extent that it could be thought of as taught by one man and covered in a single educational curriculum. ”

“ What is wanted in a popular Encyclopædia is succinct information—the more succinct the better, so long as it gives what is required by the inquiry, leaving it to the authorities in each subject to supply the information desired by those intent on pursuing it further. ”

“ The ‘Encyclopædia Britannica,’ the ‘English Encyclopædia,’ and the other great digests of human knowledge, in consequence of their high price, are accessible only to a few. In such works no special provision is made for supplying short and comprehensive information regarding individual words, arranged in their alphabetical order, of the kind most likely to be required by the great mass of general readers. ”

“ The production of a great dictionary of either of the kinds is far from an easy task. There is one way of managing the Encyclopædia which has been largely resorted to; indeed, we may say that no such work has been free from it. This plan is to throw all the attention upon the great treatises, and to resort to paste and scissors, or some process of equally easy character, for the smaller articles. However it may be done, it has been the rule that the Encyclopædia of treatises should have its supplemental Dictionary of a very incomplete character. ”

“ The plan on which the work is formed, was to select only the subjects on which it is important that a people, who feel the value of sound education, should be well informed. The minutiæ of biography, topography, scientific technicalities, and other matters to which there may be only need for occasional reference, are dismissed, and thus what usually fills the greater part of an Encyclopædia is at once got rid of. ”

“ In the form of an Encyclopaedia, the science has no room for a detailed exposition of particulars, and must be limited to setting forth the commencement of the special sciences and the notions of cardinal importance in them. ”

“ This important matter of inequality, which has led us so far, is one to which the Encyclopædia is as subject as the Cyclopædia; but it is not so easily recognized as a fault. We receive the first book as mainly a collection of treatises: we know their authors, and we treat them as individuals. ”

“ Besides always keeping in view the limits assigned to the work, it was necessary to attend to the comparative strength or weakness of the Encyclopædia in the several departments of knowledge which it embraces; to the comparative importance, novelty, and interest of the various topics presenting themselves for discussion; and to the modes of thinking, the prevailing subjects of speculation and inquiry, and the spirit of the times. ”

“ The reputation thus gained by the Encyclopædia Britannica as a comprehensive embodiment of accurate scholarship—the word being used here for authoritative exposition in all departments of knowledge—carries with it a responsibility which can only be fulfilled by periodical revision in the light of later research. ”

“ The Encyclopédistes, as they were called, because their leaders wrote the celebrated French Encyclopædia, treated in theory all notions of separate races, religions, and frontiers as so many barriers against the spread of a common civilisation, which was to unite all peoples on general principles of reason, scientific knowledge, and emancipation from local or national prejudices. ”

“ In regard to the composition, and arrangement, of the Domestic Encyclopædia, many circumstances might be pleaded, by way of apology, for occasional inaccuracies and omissions; but, in a Work, consisting chiefly of practical information, and containing, perhaps, a greater number of useful facts than have ever appeared in the compass of four moderate volumes, it is to be hoped, the discreet Reader will naturally be inclined to qualify his strictures, by a large share of candour and impartiality. ”

“ More years have passed away than we at present feel quite inclined to specify, since our attention was attracted at a very early age to an Encyclopædia, the first we had ever seen, that formed one work of a dozen or so stored on the upper shelf of a press to which we were permitted access. ”

“ The word encyclopaedia was probably first used in English by Sir Thomas Elyot. “In an oratour is required to be a heape of all maner of lernyng: whiche of some is called the worlde of science, of other the circle of doctrine, whiche is in one worde of greke Encyclopedia” (The Governour, bk. i. chap. xiii.) . In his Latin dictionary, 1538, he explains “Encyclios et Encyclia, the cykle or course of all doctrines,” and “Encyclopedia, that lernynge whiche comprehendeth all lyberall science and studies.” ”

“ While every individual article in an encyclopædia which aims at authoritative exposition must be informed by the spirit of history, it is no less essential that the spirit of science should move over The spirit of science.the construction of the work as a whole. Whatever may be the deficiencies of its execution, the Eleventh Edition has at any rate this advantage to those who use it, that the method of simultaneous preparation, already referred to, has enabled every subject to be treated systematically. ”

“ But it is “a grammar only of the sciences: a cyclopaedia is not a grammar, but a dictionary; and to confuse the meanings of grammar and dictionary is to lose the benefit of a distinction which it is fortunate that terms have been coined to convey” (Quarterly Review, cxiii. 354) . Fortunius Licetus, an Italian physician, entitled several of his dissertations on Roman altars and other antiquities encyclopaedias (as, for instance, Encyclopaedia ad Aram mysticam Nonarii, Pataviae, 1631, 4to) , because in composing them he borrowed the aid of all the sciences. ”

“ Knowledge of the first kind would have to be divided into graduated courses, like an encyclopædia, corresponding to the degree of general culture which each man has attained in his external circumstances ”

“ Those who knew him are agreed that among all the eminent men who have been connected with this great Encyclopædia from its first beginning nearly a century and a half ago until now, he was surpassed by none, if equalled by any, in the range of his learning and in the capacity to bring learning to bear upon editorial work. He took infinite pains to find the most competent writers, and was able to exercise effective personal 313 supervision over a very large proportion of the articles. ”

“ The Encyclopædia Britannica forms a General Dictionary, not only of Arts and Sciences, but of every branch of Human Knowledge. It was the first work of this class which aspired to embrace all the departments of Learning, and it was also the first which gave the example of a connected and coherent method of treating the Sciences. ”

“ Even a comparatively exhaustive treatment of the multitudinous subjects comprehended under the term universal knowledge would demand a library of large volumes, hence the extent and heavy cost of the great Encyclopædias. ”

“ The materials which have served as a foundation for the work have been derived from a great variety of sources. Besides the standard works on special subjects, scientific, literary, or historical, the numerous encyclopædias, dictionaries of the various branches of study, and popular conversations-lexicons, in which the literature of the last quarter of a century is so singularly rich, have been diligently consulted and compared. ”

“ No, but by those who in any age preceding the present would have drunk at no waters at all. Encyclopedias are the growth of the last hundred years; not because those who were formerly students of higher learning have descended, but because those who were below encyclopaedias have ascended. ”

“ The older encyclopædias attempted to give everything then known on all subjects; but, as knowledge has increased, it has become more and more necessary, in order to say something about everything, to be content not to say everything about anything. The great Latin collections of Terentius Varro, dating from 30 B. C., and the Natural History of Pliny the Elder are the first works which can in any sense be called encyclopædias. ”

“ The encyclopaedia should be available online. The encyclopaedia should be a popular choice among the native speakers of that language. The encyclopaedia should cover a broad range of articles within each specific discipline. The encyclopaedia should contain articles of reasonable length on each of the topics selected as per the reviewers' academic area of expertise, i.e. ”

“ And that discovery would betray the closely guarded secret of modern culture to the laughter of the world. For we moderns have nothing of our own. We only become worth notice by filling ourselves to overflowing with foreign customs, arts, philosophies, religions and sciences: we are wandering encyclopaedias, as an ancient Greek who had strayed into our time would probably call us. But the only value of an encyclopaedia lies in the inside, in the contents, not in what is written outside, in the binding or the wrapper. And so the whole of modern culture is essentially internal; ”

“ When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet. ”

“ I know well that I shall be told that I am out of date, that such an opinion is as the voice of one crying in the wilderness—that the dictionary catalogue has won its battle—but even so, perhaps the more so, do I feel it the part of a serious and immovable conviction to declare my belief that—for student and librarian alike—this twofold catalogue, author and subject each in its own division, is the best catalogue a library can have, and that the dictionary catalogue is the very worst. ”

“ Such a work may be a monument of careful labor, which is still misdirected. The question remains, What is its purpose, and how is its design fulfilled? There are cyclopædias upon all subjects, commerce, chemistry, agriculture, technology, fine art, engineering, and various other branches of knowledge; and they have special values, of course, for the cultivators of those branches, though very little value for general use. It is folly to expatiate upon the accuracy and fullness of a cyclopædia of antiquities, for example, to one who cares nothing about the subject. ”

“ It is a commonplace of the lecturer on popular science at the present day, that the impulse to the development of our modern scientific discoveries which became so marked toward the end of the eighteenth century, was due in a noteworthy degree to the work of the French Encyclopedists. Their bringing together of all the details of knowledge in a form in which it could be readily consulted, and in which previous progress and the special lines of advance could be realized, might be expected to prove a fruitful source of suggestive investigation. ”

“ Thus, a sort of oral encyclopedia is organized, an universal exposition of human knowledge, a permanent exposition constantly renewed and open, to which its visitors, provided with a certificate of average instruction as an entrance ticket, will see with their own eyes, besides established science that which is under of formation, besides discoveries and proofs the way of discovering and proving, namely the method, history and general progress, the place of each science in its group, and of this group its place in the general whole. ”

“ As a matter of fact, the Middle Ages furnish us with many examples of the popularization of science, of the writing of compendia of various kinds, of the gathering of information to save others the trouble, and, above all, of the making of what, in the modern time, we would call encyclopedias. Handbooks of various kinds were issued, manuals for students and specialists, and many men of broad scholarship in their time devoted themselves to the task of making the acquisition of knowledge easy for others. This was true not only for history and philosophy and literature, but also for science. ”