Page:1902 Encyclopædia Britannica - Volume 25 - A-AUS.pdf/12

VI the best work seems never to have given pause to an editor. But no scale of payment, however liberal, could have enlisted the services of all the distinguished men who contributed to these nine editions, if they had not held in high esteem the national library of reference—no longer merely a Scottish enterprise—for which they were invited to write. Sir Walter Scott, Macaulay, Arago Hazlitt. De Quincey. Professor Playfair. Jeffrey. Charles Kingsley, Picardo, Dr Hooker, Layard, Baron Bunsen, Sir David Brewster, and Professor Owen were among the contributors to the first eight editions. The contributors to the Ninth Edition numbered more than a thousand, among them so many men of the highest distinction that their quality can only be indicated by the citation of a few such names as those of Professor Huxley, Lord Kelvin, Lord Rayleigh, Sir Archibald Geikie Professor Max-Miiller, Professor Ray Lankester, Sir William Crookes, Sir Robert Ball, Mr Alfred Russel Wallace, Mr Swinburne, and Robert Louis Stevenson. The statement that the last of the new volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica will be published within a year, and that the contributors are a body no less distinguished and proportionately even more numerous, completes this brief summary of the history of the work. It has been the aim of the editors to make the new volumes so complete that no further edition will be required by the present generation, for the new portion of the work, m combination with the existing volumes of the Ninth Edition, forms, for all intents and purposes, a tenth edition.

These new volumes constitute a new, distinctive, and independent library of reference dealing with modern developments of science, art, literature, history, biography, sociology, industry, commerce, invention, medicine and surgery, although their primary purposes' to supplement, complete, and bring up to date the Ninth Edition. The urgency of complementing that edition was even greater than the date of its publication would indicate The first four volumes were published in 1875, the remainder appearing at varying intervals until the work was completed in 1889. Roughly speaking, the year 1880 may be regarded as a median date fairly representing the time of production of the average article. As a matter of fact, however, the Ninth Edition gave to the events of the Victorian Era a consideration less minute than that which it accorded to earlier periods of history and earlier developments of the arts and sciences. The intellectual point of view, in 1875, was influenced by scholastic traditions of which the rigour has since undergone considerable modification, at which what was called the historical perspective might be attained. It was thought imprudent for the writer to venture upon ice as yet but newly formed, the History of England, for example, appeared in the eighth volume, published in 1878, and of its 104 pages, 102 are concerned with events prior to the death of George IV., and only two with English history subsequent to 1830, the editors of the Ninth Edition acted in accordance with the best opinion of their generation. Since their day opinion has altered; it now seems proper that a work of reference should, as closely a full account of the most recent events and the latest phases of progress. The new volumes thus cover a period of time and a field of subject-matter proportionately larger than the period and field which the Ninth Edition added to the scope of the eighth. In selecting the point of departure for each article, as well as in deciding upon the moment at which its subject should be relinquished, the editors have been impelled by the changed