The New International Encyclopædia/Encyclopædia

ENCYCLOPÆDIA (Gk., enkyklopaedeia, a barbarous derivative of the Greek phrase , enkyklios paideia, circular, complete education). Originally, the entire group of studies which every free-born Greek youth was required to complete in preparation for active life; the liberal curriculum. In this sense the Greek phrase was adopted by the Romans. Its signification, however, was early widened, both in Greek and Roman usage, to include systematic study of, or instruction in, all the branches of learning &mdash; of the entire ‘circle’ of the arts and sciences, or of a special group of them; and this remained its dominant meaning until a comparatively recent time. At present it survives only in the technical use of the word in systematic theology and philosophy to designate the investigation the relations of the various special subjects which those disciplines include. With this idea of ‘encyclic’ education was also soon associated the notion of collecting the materials of such instruction into a single work, in which the contents and relations of the various arts and sciences should systematically be expounded. Attempts to produce books of this kind were made at an early date, though the name ‘encyclopædia’ was not given to them until the sixteenth century. This is now its common application.

What has been said of the origin of the word explains also the distinguishing characteristic of the earliest encyclopædias. They were treatises or groups of connected treatises adapted for continuous reading and study, and not mere repertories of knowledge. They were designed to serve rather as all-comprehensive text-books than as works of reference in the modern sense of that phrase. And their substance corresponded to their form, for they contained, for the most part, simply the more or less extensive accumulations of learning made by their authors individually, and bore no resemblance to the products of coöperative scholarship which the enterprise of the modern publisher has made familiar. This type of encyclopædia, with various modifications, prevailed for many centuries, and has not yet entirely been abandoned. The first is said to have been compiled by Speusippus (died B.C. 339), a disciple of Plato, but of his work in this line nothing is known. Among the Romans, Marcus Terentius Varro (died about B.C. 27) was the first of the encyclopædists, and his Disciplinarum Libri IX. (Nine Books of Studies) exemplifies well the above-explained connection of the encyclopædia with the liberal curriculum. It was an encyclopædia of the liberal arts &mdash; grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astrology, music, medicine, and architecture &mdash; in nine books,

each devoted to one of these special subjects. His Antiquitates Rerum Humanarum et Divinarum, in forty-one books, dealing with Roman antiquities, civil and religious, was of a similar character. Neither of these works has survived. The famous Historia Naturalis of Pliny the Elder ( A.D. 23-79), the earliest of the encyclopædic compilations of antiquity which we possess, approaches nearer to modern works of the kind in material, but in form does not differ essentially from its predecessors. It is an encyclopædia of natural science, considered especially with reference to human life, and, accordingly, including geography, medicine, and the history of art. The topics treated in its thirty-seven books comprise the mathematical and physical description of the world, anthropology and human physiology, zoölogy, comparative anatomy and physiology, botany (including agriculture and horticulture), medicinal zoology, and mineralogy (together with the use of the metals and of precious stones in the arts). It is a mass of facts, often ill digested, collected from a large variety of sources, and is an inexhaustible storehouse of information. About four and a half centuries later Martianus Capella, a native of North Africa &mdash; probably of Carthage &mdash; composed an encyclopædia of the seven liberal arts, which in the Middle Ages was extensively used as a text-book in the schools, and which departs even further than those above mentioned from the modern ideal. It is partly in prose and partly in verse, resembling in this the Satura Menippea of Varro and the Satyricon of Petronius; hence the names Satura and Satyricon have been given to it. Satura (satire) personified is also represented by the author as having inspired the work. Its theme is the marriage of Mercury with ‘a very learned maiden’ (doctissima virgo), Philologia (philology), on the advice of Apollo, and the various forms of learning (personified) are introduced in the bridegroom's train. Though once highly esteemed, it is now notable chiefly from the fact that in it the revolution of the planet Mercury and Venus about the sun, and not about the earth, is asserted in a passage which may have suggested to Copernicus his theory of planetary motions. A work in twenty books (unfinished), entitled Etymologiarum (Originum) Libri XX., with a similar aim, was compiled by Isidore, Bishop of Seville (about 570-636). It deals with the seven liberal arts, medicine, animals, the earth, Old Testament antiquities, etc., and was long deservedly held in high repute. The tenth book, which is etymological in contents, is arranged alphabetically. Isidore's encyclopædia was rearranged in twenty-two books, and otherwise edited in the ninth century, under the title De Universo Libri XXII., sive Etymologiarum Opus (also known as De Natura Rerum, De Origine Rerum, etc.), by another ecclesiastic, Rabanus (or Hrabanus) Maurus (c.776-866), Archbishop of Mainz. Much of Isidore's material was omitted, and Rabanus's work as a whole shows no advance beyond that of his predecessor. From about the middle of the eleventh century dates a short encyclopædic work in Greek, written in the form of questions and answers by Michael Constantinus Psellus the younger (born 1020, died after 1105), entitled. It treats of divinity, natural history, and various special topics. A more important Greek work, probably of a somewhat earlier date (though it contains quotations from Psellus which may be original), is the dictionary that bears the name of Suidas, about whom nothing is known. This is a lexicon, in general alphabetically arranged; but it contains, besides definitions of terms, a good deal of biographical, geographical, and historical information, thus suggesting an important characteristic of the modern encyclopædia, and also foreshadowing the encyclopædic dictionary of a very recent time. It is an uncritical compilation, but is still very important as a source of information about the literatures and languages of antiquity. A number of valuable critical editions of it have been issued. But the most important of all these early encyclopædias is the great Bibtiotheca Mundi, or Speculum Majus, or Speculum Triplex (as it is variously entitled in the manuscripts) of Vincent of Beauvais, a Dominican friar of the thirteenth century. It is a product of indefatigable labor and vast erudition, and sums up the learning of its time. It consists of three parts: Speculum Naturale, in thirty-two books, consisting of an account of the creation and the material world, under a great variety of topics; Speculum Doctrinale, in seventeen books, comprising language (with a dictionary of considerable length), grammar, logic, rhetoric, theology, physics, etc.; and Speculum Historiale, in thirty-one books, consisting of a history of the world from the creation down, with a prophetic forecast of the future, which covers the end of the world (placed in A.D. 2370), the reign of Antichrist, the Last Judgment, and the renewal of all things. To these a fourth part, Speculum Morale, was added by another hand. The author entitled his work Speculum (mirror) because, as he said, it reflects everything in the visible and invisible worlds which is worthy of notice &mdash; as, indeed, it fairly does for its age. It is professedly a compilation from earlier literature, and is especially valuable for its references to authors. From this time on encyclopædic works of this ancient, discursive and pedagogical character become more and more numerous, but only the following need be mentioned: Between 1260 and 1267 Brunetto Latini (1230-94), a native of Florence, wrote in French Li livres dou trésor, a summary of the various departments of philosophy, in the wide sense then assigned to the word. It consists of three books, of which the first treats of the Creation, the history of the Old and New Testaments, primitive governments, natural science, and natural history; the second of morals, consisting mainly of translations from the Ethics of Aristotle and a popular work called the Moralities of the Philosophers; and the third of instruction in rhetoric and of civil government as practiced in the Italian States of that period. This third book is particularly interesting, and the entire work is still valuable in many ways. It was printed in 1474, and several times reprinted. A critical edition of it, by a special commission, was designed by Napoleon I., but the plan was not carried out. In 1559 was published the Encyclopædia seu Orbis Disciplinarum tum Sacrarum tum Profanarum of Paul Scalich &mdash; a survey of the entire circle of science, sacred and profane, notably as the first book to which the title ‘encyclopædia’ was given. In 1630 appeared the Encyclopædia Septem Tomis Distincta of Johann Heinrich Alsted (1588-1638), in seven volumes (divided into thirty-five books), designed to be a methodical summary of all the sciences, and which, though falling far short of its aim, merited the high reputation which it long enjoyed. The second volume contains lists of Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, Greek, and Latin words defined in Latin. Lastly, the most extraordinary example of the ancient type is La science universelle (1663) of Jean Magnon, an encyclopædic poem designed to fill ten volumes of 20,000 lines each, but incomplete.

All of the above-mentioned books, and many of their successors in the same class, were more or less unsystematic, or even chaotic, in form, and crude in substance. The problem of coördinating or systematizing all the branches of science, which they in some measure at least sought to answer, was, however, a legitimate one, and the attempt to solve it was frequently repeated down to recent times. Bacon's (incomplete) Instauratio Magna has been reckoned as the first of these attempts to be made with adequate method and upon genuine philosophical principles. But that work can scarcely be described as encyclopædic, even in this sense. More obviously within this class are numerous works, chiefly German, which appeared mainly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and which were, for the most part, written from the point of view of some particular philosophical system, especially the Wolffian, Kantian, and Hegelian. Such, for example, are Eschenburg's Lehrbuch der Wissenchaftskunde (1792); Krug's Versuch einer systematischen Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften (1796-98); Schmidt's Allgemeine Encyclopädie und Methodologie der Wissenschaften (1810); Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Encyclopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften (1817).

The transition from this ancient type to the modern was due to a change in form which occurred about the middle of the seventeenth century, and which originated, doubtless, in the desire to make books of this kind more easy of consultation. This change, namely, was from the more or less logical arrangement of the material by subjects to its alphabetical arrangement by key-words, names, or special topics. In other words, the encyclopædia was assimilated to the dictionary, and from that time on the word ‘dictionary’ (or ‘lexicon’) has been freely used as the title of encyclopædic works. The change, moreover, was not confined to the form, for the alphabetical arrangement inevitably led to (if its adoption did not spring from) a change in the purpose and character of encyclopædic compilation &mdash; namely, that from the exposition of the system of human knowledge to the mechanical arrangement of its contents. The encyclopædia became, in this line of its development, a work of reference in the strict sense of that word &mdash; a work for occasional use, in which any particular topic or item of information desired can be found under the proper word in an alphabetical vocabulary. This practical aim and this method &mdash; which, as was said above, were exemplified by the Lexicon of Suidas &mdash; have, however, been adopted by modern encyclopædias in varying degrees. On the one hand there has been a tendency to approach more and more closely to the dictionary type by increasing the number and variety of the vocabulary words (topics), and correspondingly subdividing the material contained in the book; and on the other a tendency (in which the influence of the ancient pedagogical type is obvious) to restrict the vocabulary and combine the material as much as possible under comprehensive titles. In its extreme form the former has given rise to the modern ‘encyclopædic dictionary,’ and such works as the Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXème siècle of Pierre Larousse (for both see below), and the latter to encyclopædias which are little or nothing but aggregations of monographs. These two types &mdash; subdivision of material and the collection of it in monographs &mdash; are distinct, though no very exact classification of existing encyclopædias can he based upon them, since most of them conform in varying degrees to both. It may be said, however, that encyclopædia-makers incline in practice, as well as in theory, more and more toward the adoption of the former as better suited to the practical needs of scientific and literary workers, and as, in fact, essential to the adequate presentation of the vast accumulations of modern science, history, and biography. In the development of this movement the distinction between the dictionary and the encyclopædia has occasionally been obliterated by the inclusion in the vocabulary of the latter of too many of the common words of the language; it is generally recognized, however, that this should be restricted to those words which can properly be made the theme of encyclopædic articles rather than of mere definitions. As regards the material included in modern works, no general statement can be made that would not be subject to numerous exceptions. Some pay most attention to the sciences and arts, others to history, geography, biography, etc. Others are restricted to some one subject or special group of subjects. Another important characteristic of modern methods is the employment of a large corps of specialists, both as compilers and as editors. Some degree of coöperation of this kind is found in many of the encyclopædias of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, notably in the great work of Diderot and D'Alembert (for a description of which see below); but in the nineteenth century it was developed into an elaborate system, necessitated especially by the rapid advance and multiplication of the special sciences. No good general encyclopædia, at least, is now possible which does not include in its editorial staff a small army of men of science, historians, theologians, lawyers, and so on. The aim of its projectors, in a word, is to collect, at first hand, the special knowledge of the time and to present it in a manner that is acceptable to specialists. That this ideal is not always realized need not be said. Lastly, the use of pictorial illustrations &mdash; plates and diagrams, and pictures in the text, which found a place in encyclopædias at an early date, has been extended and their quality has, as a rule, been improved.

The first notable encyclopædia of this class is Le grand dictionnaire historique, ou le mélange curieux de l'histoire sacrée et profane (1671) of Louis Moréri (1613-80), in form a special dictionary of history, mythology, genealogy, and biography. It was frequently reissued, was revised and enlarged by various hands, and was translated into English, German, Spanish, and Italian. Moréri's work was marred by many imperfections, and the changes made by its successive editors left little of the original intact.

Among those who undertook the labor of correcting its defects was Pierre Bayle (1647-1706), whose Dictionnaire historique et critique (2 vols., 1695-97) is the most famous encyclopædic work of the seventeenth century. A second edition, in three volumes, was published in 1702, under the author's supervision; the third (1720), in four volumes, edited by Prosper Marchand, is one of the best. It was subsequently often reissued, and was translated into English twice (first from the second edition and later from the fifth) and German. It was, in its time, an exceedingly valuable book, and is still worth consulting. By the simplicity and clearness of its style and other literary qualities it won a permanent place in the history of literature as well as in that of lexicography. Especially notable is its skeptical tone, which made it the object of much theological animosity. Bayle, in fact, changed his religion twice, and naturally was not much loved either by Protestants or Catholics. At the same period an encyclopædia of the dictionary type, entitled Biblioteca universale sacro-profana, designed to explain an immense number of words and to cover a wide range of other subjects besides history, biography, and mythology, was undertaken by a Venetian friar, Marco Vincenzo Coronelli. Of the forty to forty-five volumes projected, only seven were issued (1701-06), comprising A, B, and part of C. The book is confused in plan and material, but is notable as the precursor of the great modern general encyclopædias. In England the dictionary method was followed by John Harris (c.1667-1719), who compiled a Lexicon Technicum; or an Universal English Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, explaining not only the Terms of Art, but the Arts themselves, published in one volume (1704), and in a second edition of two volumes (1708-10). A supplement ‘by a society of gentlemen’ appeared in 1744. It. comprises technical history, geography, and astronomy; definitions of the terms of logic, metaphysics, ethics, grammar, and rhetoric; mathematics, astronomy, botany, etc. The text is illustrated with diagrams and figures. It was long in popular use. In Germany an excellent Lexicon universale (2 vols., 1677; with supplement, 2 vols., 1683) was compiled by J. J. Hoffmann. Notable also are the Reales Staats-Zeitung und Conversations-Lexicon (1704), and its supplement, Curieuses und reales Natur-, Kunst-, Berg-, Gewerb-, und Handlungs-Lexicon (1712), edited by Johann Hübner. They were the products of many hands, and together furnish the first example of that systematic collaboration of scholars which characterizes the modern encyclopædia. A still more comprehensive work on this plan is the Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexicon aller Wissenschaften und Künste, edited by von Ludewig, Frankenstein, Longolius, and others, published 1732-54, in sixty-eight volumes (four supplementary). It is known as Zedler's Encyclopædia, from its publisher, Johannes Heinrich Zedler, of Leipzig. An English work intrinsically much more important than that of Harris, mentioned above, is Ephraim Chambers's (died 1740) Cyclopædia; or, an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, Containing an Explanation of the Terms and an Account of the Things signified thereby in the several ''Arts. . . and. . . Sciences,. . . Compiled from the Best Authors'', etc., in two volumes (1728); second (1738) and third (1739) editions during the author's life. It is more comprehensive than Harris's Lexicon (though it omits history, biography, and various other subjects), and is of a more scholarly character. The systematic use of cross-references, in order to enable the reader to obtain a connected view of general subjects, is especially noteworthy. A supplement, in two volumes, published in 1753, was based largely upon materials collected by Chambers during the last years of his life. He may be regarded as the father of English encyclopædic lexicography, and he also exerted a wide influence upon Continental literature in this department. The translation of his work issued at Venice (1748-49), in nine volumes, was the first completed Italian encyclopædia, while a French translation by John -Mills and Gottfried Sellius was the foundation of the famous Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, commonly called, par éminence, ‘the Encyclopædia.’ The task of revising Mills's translation was intrusted by the publishers to Diderot, in whose hands it developed into the production of this original and far more ambitious work. With him were associated a large number of the most distinguished scholars of the age, including D'Alembert (who undertook to edit the mathematical articles and wrote the justly celebrated Preface), Rousseau, Daubenton, Mallet, La Chapelle, d'Argenville, Louis, and Blondel. The greater part of the labor, however, fell upon Diderot himself, who was especially charged with the articles relating to the arts and trades, as well as those in history and ancient philosophy, and, in addition, undertook the general revision and coördination of the materials contributed by the others. To him accordingly the credit for the result principally belongs. In form the book is essentially an encyclopædic dictionary, containing both the common words of the language (substantives, verbs, adjectives, etc.) and proper names, accompanied by lexical descriptions and definitions, and also, in most cases, by more or less extended encyclopædic comments. It was designed “as an encyclopædia, to exhibit as far as is possible the order and system of human knowledge, and as a dictionnaire raisonné of the sciences, arts, and trades, to contain the fundamental principles and the most essential details of every science and every art, whether liberal or mechanical” (Preface). In addition, it was made the vehicle of definite philosophical views, generally radical and in part materialistic, which brought upon it the condemnation of the orthodox and upon its editor much persecution. (See ../Diderot, Denis.) This characteristic has given it an important place in the history of modern thought. In this history those who were connected with it, or accepted its views, are called distinctively ‘the Encyclopædists.’ It was published 1751-72, in twenty-eight volumes, including eleven of plates. Five supplementary volumes, with over 200 plates, appeared 1776-77, and an analytical table of contents in two volumes, 1780, increasing the total number to thirty-five. Many editions followed, and it was variously modified and supplemented.

In 1781 Charles Joseph Panckoucke (1736-98) published the plan of an Encyclopédie méthodique et par ordre des matières, which consisted in breaking up the material of Diderot's work into a series of independent dictionaries of particular

subjects, to be compiled by special editors. This scheme, very much enlarged in scope, was carried out (after Panckoucke's death by his son-in-law, Henri Agasse, and Madame Agasse) in a series of 167 volumes, with 51 parts, containing over 6000 plates, completed in 1832. Of these volumes, seven form a dictionary of zoölogy, 13 one of medicine, etc. The seed sown by Chambers was also fruitful in England. His work was reëdited by Abraham Rees (1743-1825) in 1778, and again, with the incorporation of much new matter, 1781-86, and was finally enlarged by him into the valuable New Encyclopædia; or, Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, including biography, geography, history, etc., in forty-five volumes (including six of plates, published 1802-20).

As was remarked above, the tendency toward the dictionary type has been accompanied by a tendency toward the opposite (monographic) type. An illustration of the latter is the Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (2 vols., London, 1745) of Dennis de Coetlogon, comprising 161 special treatises, arranged alphabetically by their subjects. A more important example is the Encyclopædia Britannica, first published in numbers in 1768 and completed (in three volumes) in 1771. It was planned by William Smellie (1740-95), a printer, who wrote the principal articles, and an engraver, Andrew Bell. It contained, like Coetlogon's work, distinct treatises and long articles, but also comprised definitions of technical and other terms, in alphabetical order. These general characteristics have been retained by each of the successive editions. Of these, the second was published 1777-84, and the ninth (twenty-four volumes) 1875-88. A supplement in eleven volumes is in course of publication (1900&mdash;). The so-called Cabinet Cyclopædia (133 vols.. 1829-49), edited by Dionysius Lardner, is merely an aggregate of essentially independent special works, historical, scientific, etc. An extreme application of the true monographic method is the Allgemeine Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste, in alphabetischer Folge, edited by J. S. Ersch and J. G. Gruber, which contains articles several hundred, and even thousand, pages in length. It was begun in 1818, and in 1890 167 volumes had been issued.

Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, to which we are brought by this historical review, little change has taken place in the theory of encyclopædia-making. The methods by that time established have been variously modified and combined, but not essentially altered. Progress has been made chiefly in the adaptation of methods and materials to practical needs, in the subdivision of the work of compilation and of editorial supervision among specialists, and in the consequent increase of accuracy in detail. There has, however, been a notable growth of the encyclopædic dictionary and of the special encyclopædia. The consideration of the former belongs strictly in the history of lexicography (see ../Dictionary; but several works of this kind fill in huge measure the place of the encyclopædia, and may be ranked as such. In character such a lexicon (which, as has been shown above, is no new invention) is an approximation of the true dictionary, or word-book, to the encyclopædia, just as the modern encyclopædia is an approximation of the ancient encyclopædia

to the dictionary. These two lines of development have actually met in the Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXème siècle (1865-78), in sixteen volumes (two supplementary volumes were added later), of Pierre Larousse. This is a comprehensive dictionary (etymological and defining) of the French language, and at the same time includes proper names and a vast amount of encyclopædic information. Although marred by many imperfections, it is an exceedingly useful book. Its method has been followed in several other smaller dictionaries, but it cannot yet be said to be approved by lexicographers. Such a complete combination of the two classes of material is regarded, properly, as mechanical, and, for other reasons, theoretically objectionable, however useful it may be. It is commonly held, in brief, that the encyclopædia, in encroaching upon the dictionary, should stop at the point where the true work of the latter begins &mdash; namely, the systematic collecting of the common words of the language and detailed statement of linguistic usage and history; while the dictionary, in invading the encyclopædic field, should exclude proper names and include only the technical and general information which is connected naturally with its definitions, strictly so called. This limitation is observed in the dictionaries of which The Century Dictionary: An Encyclopedic Lexicon (6 vols., 1889-91), edited by W. D. Whitney. is the most notable example. The growth of the special encyclopædia has kept pace with the advance of knowledge and of industry. History, the various branches of science and technology, biography, theology, commerce, politics, the fine arts, etc., are all admirably represented in special works of this kind. Among the most important are the encyclopædias of biography. Some excellent examples of this class date from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; but those produced in the nineteenth century are much more numerous, and, in several cases, far more comprehensive. The most notable of these later biographical works are: the Biographie universelle ancienne et moderne (85 vols., 1811-62, including supplement; 2d ed., 45 vols., 1842-65) of Joseph and Louis Gabriel Michaud; the Nouvelle biographie générale, depuis les temps les plus reculés jusqu'à nos jours (46 vols., 1852-66) edited by Hoefer; and the Dictionary of National Biography (66 vols., 3 supplementary, 1885-1901), edited by Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee.

Some of the more noteworthy general encyclopædias, published during the nineteenth century, not mentioned above, are the following: In English: The Edinburgh Encyclopædia (18 vols., 1808-30), edited by Sir David Brewster; the Encycloplopædia Metropolitana (30 vols., 1818-45), edited by Edward Smedley, Hugh J. Rose, and Henry J. Rose &mdash; only in part alphabetically arranged; the Penny Cyclopædia (29 vols., 1833-46), edited by Charles Knight for the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge; the English Cyclopedia (27 vols., 4 supplementary, 1854-73), also edited by Knight &mdash; arranged by subjects in four divisions; Chambers's Encyclopædia (10 vols., 1860-68; new ed., 1888-92), edited by Andrew Findlater, the new edition edited by David Patrick; Encyclopædia Londinensis (24 vols., 1810-29); Encyclopædia Americana (14 vols., 1839-47), edited by Francis Lieber; The American Cyclopædia (16 vols., 1858-63; new ed. 1873-76), edited by George Ripley and Charles A. Dana; Johnson's New Universal Cyclopædia (1874-78; revised, as Johnson's Universal Cyclopædia, in 8 vols., 1893-95), the latest edition edited by Charles Kendall Adams; Blackie's Modern Cyclopedia of Universal Information (9 vols., 1890), edited by Charles Annandale; A Dictionary of Science, Literature, and Art (3 vols., 1872; new edition of an earlier work by Brande), by W. T. Brande and G. W. Cox; The Cambridge Encyclopædia: A Compendium of History, Religion, Chronology, Arts, Sciences, and General Information (1899&mdash;; published monthly); The International Cyclopædia (New York, L884; new eds. 1891, 1894, 1898), now discontinued and superseded by the present work, The New International Encyclopædia, in 17 volumes (1902&mdash;).

In German: Brockhaus's Konversations-Lexikon (1796-1808; subsequently often revised and greatly enlarged; 14th ed. in 17 vols., one supplementary, 1892-97; again revised, 1901&mdash;), one of the most serviceable and scholarly encyclopædias in any language, especially noteworthy in method as a happy mean between excessive subdivision of material and the monographic type (see above); Pierer's Universal-Lexikon, oder encyclopädisches Wörterbuch der Wissenschaften, Künste und Gewerbe (26 vols., 1824-36; 7th ed., in 12 vols., 1888-93); Meyer's Neues Konversations-Lexikon (37 vols., 1839-52; 4th ed., in 17 vols., 1885-90; 5th ed., 18 vols., 1894-98; 6th ed. 1902&mdash;), a work of much the same quality as that of Brockhaus; Allgemeine Real-Encyklopädie oder Konversations-Lexikon für das katholische Deutschland (12 vols., 1846-51; 4th ed., in 13 vols., 1880-90); Wetzer and Welte's Kirchen-Lexicon (in 13 vols., 1847-60; 2d ed. 1882-1901).

In French: Encyclopédie des gens du monde: répertoire universel des sciences, des lettres et des arts, etc. (22 vols., 1833-44); Dictionnaire de la conversation et de la lecture (52 vols., 1832-39; supplement, in 16 vols., 1844-51; 2d ed., in 16 vols., 1851-58; 5 supplementary vols., 1865-82); Encyclopédie moderne; dictionnaire abrégé des sciences, des lettres, des arts, de l'industrie, de l'agriculture et du commerce (26 vols., 1823-32; new ed., in 27 vols., with 12 supplementary vols. and an atlas, in 2 vols., 1847-62), edited by Courtin; Encyclopédie du XIXème siècle répertoire universel des lettres, des sciences et des arts, avec la biographie de tous les hommes célèbres (28 vols., 1837-59; 2d ed. 1858-64; continued as Annuaire encyclopédique), edited by Ange de Saint-Priest; Dictionnaire encyclopédique universel, illustré de 20,000 figures (1895&mdash;), conducted by E. Flammarion; La grande encyclopédie: inventaire raisonné des sciences, des lettres et des arts, etc. (1886; 30 vols. by 1902).

In other languages: Nuovo Enciclopedia popolare (14 vols., Turin, 1841-51); Dizionario universale di scienze, lettere ed arti (Milan, 1874), by Lessona and Valle; Enciclopedia popolare italiana (Milan, 1872), edited by Giovanni Berri; Enciclopedia universale o repertorio didascalico (5 vols., Prato, 1868); Nuova enciclopedia italiana, etc. (25 vols., Turin, 1875-88), by G. Boccardo; Enciclopedia moderna (34 vols. with an atlas, Madrid, 1848-51), by Mellando; Diccionario enciclopédico Hispano-Americano de literatura, ciencias y artes (Barcelona, 1887-99; 25 vols.), by Montaner y Simson; Diccionario universal de la lengua castellana,

ciencias y artes (Madrid, 3d ed., 15 vols., 2 supplements, with ‘album,’ 1879-81), based on the plan of Nicolas Maria Serrano; Diccionario popular historico geographico, mythologico, etc. (16 vols., Lisbon, 1876-90), by Chaga; Diccionario universal portuguez illustrado, by Zeforina; Salmonsen's store illustrerede Konversations-leksikon (Copenhagen, 1891&mdash;; 12 vols, issued by 1901); Geïllustreerde encyclopedie: woordenboek for wetenschap en kunst (Rotterdam, 2d ed., 16 vols., 1884-88); Entsiklopeditchesky Slovar (Saint Petersburg; 35 vols, down to 1902); Bolshaya entsiklopedia (Saint Petersburg, 1901&mdash;; 8 vols. issued); Encyclopedya Powszechna, etc. (Warsaw, 1898&mdash;; 12 vols. by 1902), by S. Orgelbrand.