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/9



As the Encyclopædia Britannica differed considerably from every work of the kind by which it was preceded, it may be useful, briefly to notice the more important of those works, before giving any account of that Encyclopædia and the improvements it has successively received, or of this Supplement to its later editions.

Though the term Encyclopædia is of Grecian origin, the works to which it has been applied belong all to the modern world. Pliny’s Natural History has been sometimes called the Encyclopædia of the Ancients; and he tells us himself, in his preface, that.it embraces all that the Greeks included under that term; but it is only in the compass and variety of its contents that it can be said to resemble the modern Encyclopædias. Its method is that of a work chiefly descriptive; it being no part of the author’s plan to examine and classify the objects of inquiry according to their scientific relations; or to point out the place they ought to hold in the Circle of Knowledge. The object which the compilers of the first Encyclopædias proposed to themselves, was, to reduce every thing comprehended within that Circle to a systematic form; and their works accordingly consisted of a series of Systems, intended to exhibit an orderly Digest of all, or of some of the most important branches of Knowledge and Art. Such seems to have been the object of various works, published under the title of Encyclopædias, during the latter half