some of the best features of that excellent work. Its
arrangement seems to us peculiarly inconvenient; but its most
glaring defect is the lack of American subjects, and the slipshod,
unsatisfactory, and inaccurate manner in which the few that are found in
it have been treated. The "Encyclopaedia Britannica" is open to the same
objection. The first edition of this great work appeared over ninety
years ago. It contained neither historical, biographical, nor
geographical articles, and was rather a collection of treatises on the
principal arts and sciences than a cyclopaedia in the common acceptation
of the term. It has since been five times almost remodelled, arranged
alphabetically, and greatly enlarged; but it still preserves its old
distinguishing feature of treating great scientific and historical
subjects exhaustively under a single head: for instance, there are two
elaborate historical articles on "Britain" and "England," but none
on Charles I. or Charles II.; long articles on "Animal Kingdom" and
"Mammalia,"--so long, in fact, that it is almost impossible to find
anything in them without an index,--but none on the separate animals.
For the scholar, this plan, perhaps, has its advantages; but, for the
unlearned reader, who turns to his cyclopaedia to find an intelligible
account of the habits of some particular creature, without caring
greatly what its precise place may be in the zooelogical kingdom, or
looks for a name without knowing whether it belongs to a fish or a
river, no book that professes to be a manual of reference could well be
arranged on a more inconvenient principle. One of the chief duties of
a cyclopaedia is to save trouble,--to put one on the high-road to
knowledge, without unnecessary delay in finding the guide-boards. But
send a half-educated man to look for a scrap of learning in an article
of a hundred pages, and one might as well at once turn him loose into
a library. And what is worse, the unwieldy dimensions of these great
articles are out of all proportion to the information they contain. We
venture to assert that the ponderous "Encyclopaedia Britannica," with
its twenty-two quarto volumes, will tell less, for instance, about the
Horse, or about Louis XIV., than the much smaller work of Messrs. Ripley
and Dana. In the "New American Cyclopaedia" there are few articles
over twenty pages long. The leading subjects in the sciences, such as
"Anatomy," "Botany," "Physiology," etc., have from three