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xxxvi other sources of information, upon subjects where “profound learning” is wished to be attained. Nor is there any risk of such works intercepting the resort to others, where the desire for information exists in the requisite degree of ardour. They may stimulate curiosity, and nourish a love for study, m minds that might otherwise remain passive or inert; but they will never induce a feeling of satisfaction with deficient information, where it is incomplete, in minds that would have otherwise grasped at larger and richer acquisitions.

There never was, at any time, but one objection specially applicable to this class of publications;—that, namely, of breaking the Sciences into fragments, scattered fortuitously among the Letters of the Alphabet; and it must ever reflect credit on the Encyclopædia Britannica, to have been the first that fully remedied a defect which had been deemed inseparable from such undertakings. Since that period, some of the most valuable of the systematic treatises, with which the Sciences have, in this Country, been enriched, have appeared in Encyclopædias; and have in that way obtained a far wider and more beneficial circulation than they could ever otherwise have reached.

These works, indeed, have a cosmopolitan character, which, in an improving state of society, recommends them equally to every rank, from the Mechanic to the Peer. The history of Letters affords no example of any association for the advancement of the Sciences, so truly useful, and so free from all paltry cabals, and degrading influences, as those through which such publications are formed. Nor are there any other undertakings of a literary nature, in which the talents of so many individuals of different parties, and of all varieties of intellectual pursuit and attainment, can be so happily and efficiently combined, in the common cause of Science and Learning.

Edinburgh, March, 1824.