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/18

x and consistency, yet to an extent, exemplifying a great and beneficial improvement, in the arrangement of Encyclopedical Dictionaries. All the more important objects of an Encyclopædia, were thus made attainable, in a work constructed in the form of a Dictionary;—a form freed from the inconveniences which must ever attend the methods pursued in the first Encyclopædias, by the number of its heads of explanation and reference; and which admits of an easy incorporation of any variety of details that may appear conducive to the diffusion of knowledge.

The Editor of the first edition of this Encyclopædia, of which he was also the principal compiler, was Mr William Smellie; by profession a Printer, and then well known as a man of considerable ability and attainments. It has been said, “that the plan of the work was devised by him;” and he was more likely, certainly, to have suggested it, than any other person known to have been connected with the undertaking. The plan, however, was not altogether so original as it was represented. It had been partially exemplified, as has been already hinted, many years before, by Dr De Coetlogon, in his Universal History of Arts and Sciences. “I have divided Philosophy,” says this author, in delineating the arrangement of his work, “into Ethics, Logic, and Metaphysics, treating each branch under its proper head; subdividing the fourth, Physics, into several others; each making a whole treatise by itself.” In this method, we have the basis of the plan in question; and it seems highly probable, that the primary idea of it was derived from this unnoticed quarter.

In the second edition, published between 1778 and 1783, the work was extended to ten volumes; and it was farther distinguished by the addition of two departments, not hitherto embraced by any similar publication—Biography and History. In the French Encyclopédie, though there were occasional notices of remarkable persons in the articles on the history of philosophy and science, there was no series of separate lives; and no place whatever was assigned to civil history. The Supplement to that work professed to include history in its plan; but its his-

12