ors; it being held impossible that any editorial efforts can
secure a uniform standard of goodness. Wherever the greatest power is
found, it should be suffered to produce its natural effect. There are,
indeed, critics who think that the merit of a book, like the strength of a
chain, is that of its weakest part: but there are others who know that the
parallel does not hold, and who will remember that the union of many
writers must show exaggeration of the inequalities which almost always
exist in the production of one person. The true plan is to foster all the
good that can be got, and to give development in the directions in which
most resources are found: a Cyclopaedia, like a plant, should grow towards
the light.

The _Penny Cyclopaedia_ had its share of this kind of defect or excellence,
according to the way in which the measure is taken. The circumstance is not
so much noticed as might be expected, and this because many a person is in
the habit of using such a dictionary chiefly with relation to one subject,
his own; and more still want it for the pure dictionary purpose, which does
not go much beyond the meaning of the word. But the person of full and
varied reference feels the differences; and criticism makes capital of
them. The Useful Knowledge Society was always odious to the organs of
religious bigotry; and one of them, adverting to the fact that geography
was treated with great ability, and most unusual fullness, in the _Penny
Cyclopaedia_, announced it by making it the sole merit of {287} the work
that, with sufficient addition, it would make a tolerably good gazetteer.

Some of our readers may still have hanging about them the feelings derived
from this old repugnance of a class to all that did not associate direct
doctrinal teaching of religion with every attempt to communicate knowledge.
I will take one more instance, by way of pointing out the extent to which
stupidity can go. If there be an astronomical fact of the telescopic
character which, next after Saturn's ring and Jupiter's satellites, was
known to all the world, it was the existence of multitudes of double stars,
treble stars, etc. A respectable quarterly of the theological cast, which
in mercy we refrain from naming, was ignorant of this common
knowledge,--imagined that the mention of such systems was a blunder of one
of the writers in the _Penny Cyclopaedia_, and lashed the presumed ignorance
of the statement in the following words, delivered i