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Rh in respectful terms; accompanied, however, with an earnest wish, that some of the learned would either join in remodelling and improving it, or in forming another work of the same kind. His observations show, that he had reflected much on the nature of such an undertaking; and that he considered an Encyclopædia as a species of publication calculated to be eminently useful to mankind.

After what has been said of the early Encyclopædias, it is scarcely necessary to observe, that though the term Encyclopædia is now familiarized to us as the appellative for Dictionaries of Science and general Knowledge, the works to which it was first applied were by no means constructed in the form of Dictionaries. It was long before the idea occurred, that the whole Circle of Knowledge might be comprehended, and discussed, in a work digested in that convenient method; or that any thing could be done towards fulfilling the objects aimed at in these Encyclopædias, if it were adopted. Nearly a century elapsed from the publication of Alstedius’s Encyclopædia, before any considerable attempt was made to present the world with an Encyclopedical Dictionary.

Dictionaries of technical terms, and Dictionaries explaining the rudiments of particular sciences, had been long in use throughout Europe; but the first work of the kind professing to embrace a detailed view of the whole body of the Sciences and Arts was the Lexicon Technicum of Dr Harris. This work was published at London in 1710, and is generally regarded as the first great advance to the form and objects of the more modern Encyclopædias. But, though professing to be “an Universal Dictionary of the Arts and Sciences, explaining not only the terms of art, but the arts themselves,” its explanations were mostly confined to the mathematical and physical sciences; with respect to which, it has always been allowed, that it was fully on a level with the knowledge of that age.