EVERY encyclopædia has to confront, from the start, questions of plan and arrangement, involving the best method of putting its information before readers so that it shall render them the best service. There are but two expedients that have had any practical consideration; one may be called the library and the other the dictionary plan.

The dictionary plan consists in entering, for convenience in consultation, as many titles of articles as possible, and defining them as sententiously as possible. A book so made is essentially a lexicon, or glossary of terms, and nowadays we have come to have a class of dictionaries which, because of their definition of all sorts of technical, trade and patented terms, are, as they call themselves, encyclopædic. But a true encyclopædia is far more than a word-book. A word-book breaks all arts, sciences, philosophies, mechanisms and history into adjectives and nouns, and defines each separately. The difference is immense. For example, a man who knows all about a ship may be content with dictionary definitions of keels, stems, booms, strakes, etc., but the landsman has no acquaintance with these terms until he can turn to some account of ship-building, where he finds them used in a context that gives them intelligibility. Until he reads in this manner he does not even know the terms he needs to have defined. Now, an encyclopædia deals with events and things, rather than with words, and is therefore at once more elementary, as it is also more exhaustive and complete, than a dictionary. It is to help those who do not know what details or terms to look for. It is to explain processes, sequences, relations; and so the encyclopædia has a function far different from that which a dictionary can take up. The latter helps one to a ready understanding of what he has encountered in the world; the former takes him into new fields, and acquaints him with things he has not met with or anticipated.

Undoubtedly, the earliest design of an encyclopædia was to furnish students with a cheap, compact and universal library. At first, books were so expensive that students were unable to buy the special histories, commentaries and treatises published. The situation was not altered when books became cheaper; for industries and sciences and researches were multiplied and subdivided still faster. The encyclopædia then came, and offered, in a compendious way, the contents of thousands of volumes. It also grew rapidly in bulk, until, finally, the largest referencebook in the history of English literature appears in our thirty-volume edition of the ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA. It contains nearly 12,000,000 more words than the most voluminous encyclopædic English dictionary extant, and thus illustrates the impossibility of taking into even an elaborate lexicon the historical, biographical, geographical, and statistical features of an encyclopædia.

THE ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA was first published in 1771. Its proprietors announced it as on a new plan, the different sciences and arts being "digested into treatises and systems." It was a distinct adoption of the library plan, and it has been adhered to in all subsequent editions. The result is, that the edition here announced contains long articles that would make over fifty duodecimo volumes of 600 pages of small-pica print, each devoted to some special branch of art, theology, science, history, etc. The entire compass of this issue of the work would make 140 such volumes.

It is this library system that has constituted the strength and the weakness of the BRITANNICA, the strength, because it lays under contribution a higher and more critical scholarship; the weakness, because the difficulty of referring to particular details or topics is increased. The testimony to its strength is unimpeachable, for it comprises the verdict of scholars and reading men the world over, indorsing its authority, and commending its skill of presentation and comprehensiveness as unapproached in any other English work of reference. The testimony also further indorses the fact that its pages are the storehouse from which other encyclopædias both replenish their columns and correct their errors. But beyond all this, it is indorsed triumphantly in the fact that more copies of the ninth edition of the BRITANNICA have passed into circulation, by scores of thousands, than of any other reference-book of contemporary sale.

A treatise has a law of art to govern its production; defining and explaining do not result in an art. Thus, were one to visit an inclosure in which were gathered all the material of a classic temple, the stones and cements, the framing and the girders, the columns, keystones, capitals, molding and chiseled friezes,-—it might instruct one to find each detail packed in barrels and cases, duly labeled, and assorted into piles, according to the alphabetical order of their labels. But such iii L

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instruction would be far inferior to that gathered from the study of the temple itself, with all its parts and members in place and order, exhibiting at once the architect's design and the constructor's skill. There is something, therefore, in "distinct treatises and systems that must forever elude the definer. A writer, too, however skilled and accomplished, sacrifices his best qualities if he must break his subject into details and write them up separately for presentation under an arbitrary alphabetical arrangement.

It is, then, because of the library or treatise plan of the BRITANNICA, that its scholarship has been recognized as unsurpassed, its criticism as vital and lucid, its information as so varied and instructive. Let the plan stand, with all its splendid characteristics; a suitable system of reference is all that is needed to make the BRITANNICA stores of knowledge accessible. Thus, while keeping

its own matchless qualities, it partakes of every convenience offered by the topical encyclopædias, that boast of needing no index.

After some years of experience with the book, having sold it all over the United States, and having learned in the operation what would best adapt it to the needs of the English-speaking world, THE WERNER COMPANY undertook to make this new edition (virtually the TENTH) of the ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA. The aims sought are, to supplement the BRITANNICA as to bring all the developments of history, discovery, arts and sciences down to date; to extend biography as to include living men of distinction; to enlarge the view of American interests; and to supply references to the original text, making the whole work available for easy consultation.

The work was intrusted to an editor who had spent twelve years in the study of the BRITANNICA, about whom was gathered an office-staff of twenty and a special staff of sixty-seven persons, including heads of bureaus in Washington, army and navy officers, eminent theologians, college presidents and professors, women at the head of the best-managed reforms, educators, statesmen and specialists. Their names will be found in the front of each supplementary volume.

The features of this new WERNER EDITION of the BRITANNICA are as follows:

1. An exhibition, by means of copious cross-references, of all the matter usually found in encyclopædias, which is incorporated in the original text of the BRITANNICA. This was done, primarily, to indicate the completeness of the treatment of details in the original work, obscured by the treatise plan, and to show the reader how to find them; and secondly, to avoid repetitious handling of subjects, thus saving room for new matter.

2. An extension of the original articles on history, geography, discovery, pure and applied science, invention, politics, arts and literary and general criticism, down to the very day of publication. 3. The introduction of new topics, either arising from the differentiation of new departments of science; as, ECOLOGY, SENSE-ORGANS, SEGMENTATION OF THE VERTEBRATE BRAIN, etc.; or from discovery and invention; as, ARGON, ROENTGEN RAYS, KINETO-PHONOGRAPH, TESLA'S OSCILLATOR, SUBMARINE BOATS, etc.

4. Biographical enlargement, to cover eminent living persons, and the hundreds who have. recently won distinction, of whom this edition sketches, under the authority of personal correspondence, many whose names appear in no other work of reference.

5. A particular survey of American interests in their latest phases.

6. A presentation of technical subjects in a form comprehensible to ordinary readers, as in the treatment of ELECTRICITY, MORPHOLOGY, etc.

7. A method of copious illustrations, amounting in number to fifteen hundred, including likenesses of notable persons, seals and capitols of states, college and university buildings, architectural structures in great cities, monumental work, and figures and diagrams exhibiting mechanisms and results of biological research.

8. A system of treating subjects by departments, so that large groups passed under the charge of specialists. Among others, THE WERNER COMPANY especially acknowledges the services of C. H. Cochrane, M. E., in Mechanisms, Dr. John M. Coulter in Botany, G. Mercer Adam in Literary Biography, Hon. C. D. Wright and Dr. John M. Finley in Sociological Questions, Hon. John Sherman in United States Finances, Dr. John Bach McMaster in Political Organizations, Dr. W. A. Locy in Zoology, Dr. Alexander Smith in Chemistry, Dr. S. W. Stratton in Electricity, Dr. B. A. Hinsdale in Education, and Mrs. Ellen M. Henrotin in the Advancement of Women. The systematic work of these departmental coadjutors will be found invaluable.

9. The last word that has yet been said on every theme of general or special interest. 10. It is claimed for this SUPPLEMENT that it will give new value to sets of all British and American editions heretofore bought, as well as bring them down to a later date than any other encyclopædia extant. The aim of THE WERNER COMPANY has been to put upon the market a work superior to and more recent than any work of reference in the language. Its articles are made as popular in style as fidelity to truth will permit, and, in any event, on no point of vital importance are its pages to be surpassed.

PARTIAL LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

TO THE NEW AMERICAN SUPPLEMENT.

[ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA.]