Pliny and Quintilian that the circle of the sciences was so called by the Greeks, and Vitruvius has thence naturalized encyclium in Nevertheless we admit that the initial en would have euphonized but badly with the word Penny and the English Cyclopædia is the augmented, revised, and distributed edition of the Penny Cyclopædia. It has indeed been said that Cyclopædia should mean the education of a circle, just as Cyropædia is the education of Cyrus. But this is easily upset by Aristotle's word κυκλοφορία, motion in a circle, and by many other cases, for which see the lexicon.
The earliest printed Encyclopædia of this kind was perhaps the famous 'myrrour of the worlde,' which Caxton translated from the French and printed in 1480. The original Latin is of the thirteenth century, or earlier. This is a collection of very short treatises. In or shortly after 1496 appeared the 'Margarita Philosophica' of Gregory Reisch, the same we must suppose, who was confessor to the Emperor Maximilian. This is again a collection of treatises, of much more pretension: and the estimation formed of it is proved by the number of editions it went through. In 1531, appeared the little collection of works of Ringelberg, which is truly called an Encyclopædiaby Morhof, though the thumbs and fingers of the two hands will meet over the length of its one volume. There are more small collections but we pass on to the first work to which the name of Encyclopædia is given. This is a ponderous 'Scientiarum Omnium Encyclopædia' of Alsted, in four folio volumes, commonly bound in two; published in 1629 and again in 1649; the true parent of all the Encyclopædias, or collections of treatises, or works in which that character predominates. The first great dictionary may perhaps be taken to be Hofman's 'Lexicon Universale' (1677); but Chambers's (so called) Dictionary (1728) has a better claim. And we support our proposed nomenclature by observing that Alsted accidentally called his work Encyclopædia, and Chambers simply Cyclopædia.
We shall make one little extract from the 'myrrour,' and one from Ringelberg. Caxton's author makes a singular remark for his time; and one well worthy of attention. The grammar rules of a language, he says, must have been invented by foreigners: 'And whan any suche tonge was perfytely had and usyd amonge any people, than other people not used to the same tonge caused rulys to be made wherby they myght lerne the same tonge…and suche rulys be called the gramer of that tonge.' Ringelberg says that if the right nostril bleed, the little finger of the right
