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Rh and new statistics on all subjects become accessible, those which have been given here for their historical value are, as such, unaffected by the lapse of time; but if they had been slavishly inserted simply because they were the latest in the series of years immediately preceding publication, their precarious connexion with any continuous evolution would soon have made them futile. So much has been done in the Eleventh Edition to bring the record of events, whether in political history or in other articles, down to the latest available date, and thus to complete the picture of the world as it was in 1910, that it is necessary to deprecate any misconception which might otherwise arise from the fact that statistics are inserted not as events in themselves—this they may or may not be, according to the subject-matter—but as a method of expressing the substantial results of human activity; for that purpose they must be given comparatively, selected as representative, and weighed in the balance of the judicious historian.

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 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. Not only in the case of “science” itself, but in history, law, or any other kind of knowledge, its contributors were all assisting to carry out a preconcerted scheme, each aware of the relation of his or her contribution to others in the same field; and the interdependence of the related parts must be remembered by any reader who desires to do justice to the treatment of any large subject. Cross-references and other indications in the text are guides to the system employed, which are supplemented in greater detail by the elaborate Index. But the scientific spirit not only affects the scheme of construction as a whole: it has modified the individual treatment. Attention may perhaps be drawn to two particular points in this connexion;—the increased employment of the comparative method, and the attempt to treat opinion and controversy objectively, without partisanship or sectarianism.

The title of the Encyclopædia Britannica has never meant that it is restricted in its accounts of natural science, law, religion, art, or other subjects, to what goes on in the British dominions; but a considerable extension has been given in the Eleventh Edition to the amount of information it contains concerning the corresponding activities in other countries. By approaching each subject, as far as possible, on its merits, the contributors in every department aim at appraising the achievements of civilization from whatever source they have arisen, and at the same time, by inserting special sections on different countries when this course is appropriate, they show the variations in practice under different systems of government or custom. But the subjects are not only arranged comparatively in this sense: new branches of study have arisen which are of chief importance mainly for the results attained by the comparative method. The impetus given to comparative sociology by Herbert Spencer, the modern interest in comparative law, religion, folklore, anthropology, psychology and philology, have resulted in the accumulation of a mass of detail which it becomes the task of an encyclopædia produced on the plan of organized co-operation to reduce to manageable proportions and intelligible perspective. Comparative bibliography, so much fostered of late years by the growth of great library organizations, undergoes in its turn the same process; and expert selection makes the references to the best books a guide to the student without overwhelming him. To deal here with all the lines of new research which have benefited by the comparative method in recent years would trench unnecessarily upon the scope of the contents of the work, where sufficient is already written. One illustration must suffice of a science in which the new treatment affects both the substance and the form of the articles in the Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Comparative Anatomy, as a branch of Zoology, can no longer be scientifically separated from Human Anatomy. The various parts of the human body are therefore systematically treated under separate headings, in connexion not only with the arts of medicine and surgery, which depend on a knowledge of each particular structure, but with the corresponding features in the rest of the animal kingdom, the study of which continually leads to a better understanding of the human organism. Thus comparative anatomy and human anatomy take their places, with physiology and pathology, as interdependent and