Page:EB1911 - Volume 29.djvu/5



T may, perhaps, appear at first sight that an encyclopædia arranged in alphabetical order should need no Index volume, more especially a work like the Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which has replaced the comprehensive general, or "omnibus," articles; so characteristic of the earlier editions, by a number of shorter articles easily consulted by the student. But it still remains true that to make the fullest and best use of the book an index of some kind is imperatively needed. Since any encyclopædia worthy of the name must take all knowledge for its province, it is obvious that the world itself would scarcely contain the volumes which would have to be written, were every person, place or thing treated in a separate article. Moreover, the distribution of information over a number of short articles involves the necessity of collecting it together again in a form convenient for reference. To meet this need, as well as to point the reader to information on other subjects, not themselves included among the 40,000 article headings of the Eleventh Edition, an Index has been compiled, which, though containing considerably more than 500,000 headings, even so only aims at presenting a selection, not a miscellany, of information. If every name mentioned, however casually, in the Encyclopædia Britannica and every scrap of information had been indexed, the references would have filled a library. Indeed the Encyclopædia Britannica itself would have been rewritten, and not bettered in the process.

The editors of this Index believe that in the case of such a work as the Encyclopedia Britannica the value of the Index depends less upon exhaustiveness than upon intelligent selection and arrangement. There is no more potent cause of mental indigestion than a mass of unsifted and often irrelevant detail. If economy of space is required in a reference book, there is a still more urgent demand on the part of the Inquirer for economy of effort. In the case of any one of the great figures of history, or the leading scientific theories, a reader does not want to be referred to every passing allusion to Julius Caesar, or Napoleon, or Bismarck. The article on Augustus says that he was born in the year of Cicero's consulship, but to record that fact in the Index under the heading "Cicero" would be neither intelligent nor useful. Nor would the reader who wishes to get a clear idea of the Darwinian theories be grateful to an index which referred him to every passage containing the word "evolution."

In short, the Concordance-index has been studiously avoided. The ideal has rather been to render easily accessible all information of real importance in the book, and rigorously to exclude  passing allusions to subjects which are more fully treated elsewhere To help the reader to find