Page:Supplement to the fourth, fifth, and sixth editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica - with preliminary dissertations on the history of the sciences - illustrated by engravings (IA gri 33125011196181).pdf/10

ii of the sixteenth, and first half of the seventeenth century; and if we are to look for any earlier exemplars, it must be among the unpublished remains of the Arabian writers of the middle ages. One of the most celebrated of them, Alfarabius, the great ornament of the School of Bagdad in the tenth century, is mentioned as the author of an Encyclopædia, seemingly of this description. The only notice of it that has yet appeared, is that given by Casiri, in his curious and valuable account of the works of the Arabian authors, preserved in manuscript in the library of the Escurial at Madrid. He describes it as a treatise, “ubi Scientiarum Artiumque liberalium Synopsis occurrit, una cum accurata et perspicua earum notitia definitione, divisione, methodo;” mentioning, at the same time, that it is inscribed with the title of Encyclopedia.

The most noted and valuable of the early Encyclopædias was that of John Henry Alstedius, a Professor of Philosophy and Calvinistic Divinity, first at Herborn in the county of Nassau, afterwards at Weissembourg in Transylvania; and who is said to have been the author of about sixty other works, though he died at the age of fifty, in 1638. His Encyclopædia, by which alone his name is remembered, appeared in 1630, in two large folio volumes. A smaller and less comprehensive work of the same kind, published by him ten years before, served as the groundwork of this more extensive undertaking; in which he professedly aimed at the formation of a complete Encyclopædia. It consists of thirty-five books, of which the first four are introductory; containing an explanation of the nature and requisites of the various studies which form the subjects of the rest. Then follow successively, six books on Philology; ten on speculative, and four on practical Philosophy; three on Theology, Jurisprudence, and Medicine; three on the mechanical Arts; and five on History, Chronology, and Miscellaneous subjects. This work continued to be held in considerable estimation, till the close of that century. Leibnitz mentions it, in the early part of the next,

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