throughout its pages a lack of accuracy which frequently misleads the reader, while the number of the volumes and their excessive bulk render the encyclopædia both inconvenient in use and almost prohibitory in cost.
The famous Conversations-Lexikon, completed and first published by Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus in 1812, and continued by him and his successors through many subsequent editions down to the present time, is an approximation to the ideal encyclopædia. Its accuracy has become proverbial. Its selection of topics and its careful division and sub-division of them for treatment in detail have secured both comprehensiveness of scope and convenience of arrangement. Where it falls short of approaching something like perfection is in the dryness of its narration and its thoroughly German neglect of literary form. Nevertheless, on the Continent of Europe it has long been accepted as the standard encyclopedic work of reference, and it has been translated and imitated in almost every country, notably in the valuable and popular encyclopædia of Chambers, of which the edition that appeared at Edinburgh in 1860 was not only based upon the Conversations-Lexikon, but was confessedly in part translated from it.
These three types of encyclopædia represent, as it were, the survival of the fittest, and each of them owes something to the others. Historically, all three have been developed out of the ponderous compilations of the eighteenth century, among which Zedler's Universal-Lexikon, in sixty-four volumes (1750), d'Alembert and Diderot's famous Encyclopédie in twenty-eight (1772), and Ersch and Gruber's Allgemeine Encyclopädie in more than one hundred and sixty volumes remain the most remarkable examples. The gradual evolution of the modern encyclopedia forms, indeed, an interesting study. The older works originally grouped their articles under related departments rather than in alphabetical order; and it was only after many years that the alphabetical arrangement came into general use as being infinitely more convenient for the reader, even though theoretically less scientific. The elaborate system of cross-references, which is now a subject of especial study on the part of all encyclopædic editors, was first developed by Ephraim Chambers in the early part of the nineteenth century. The elucidation of the text by means of diagrams, maps, portraits, colored plates, and other illustrations, was at first quite sparingly employed; but it was an interesting feature of the Encyclopædia Britannica, and was finally adopted on a very lavish scale by Brockhaus and by Meyer in Germany.
All modern encyclopædias have incorporated these three features as being absolutely essential. Such fundamental differences as are perceptible between them will be found to exist partly in the scope and purpose of each separate publication, and partly in the method by which the original design has been carried out by those to whom the task has been committed. It therefore seems desirable that, in writing these words of introduction, the Editors of the New International Encyclopædia should set forth as briefly, yet as clearly as is possible, the manner in which they have endeavored to insure at least a close approximation to what, in their best judgment, an ideal encyclopædia should be.
Since accuracy is very properly regarded as the most essential of all the attributes of such a publication, the Editors have been at especial pains to make this work in its several departments fitly representative of modern scientific scholarship. There has long prevailed in certain quarters a definite yet quite untenable belief that this result can be most satisfactorily attained by assigning sets of articles to separate contributors of eminence, for them to write what pleases them and then to sign what they have written. The signed article, it has been claimed, is the best possible guarantee of accuracy, since it carries with it the weight and the authority of its author's name. This theory, however, will not bear a close examination. For it is evident that no single specialist, however eminent, can be so thoroughly equipped at every point as to leave in what he writes no room for criticism. He has his individual preferences strongly marked, and necessarily also his individual bias. In treating matters of scientific doctrine, therefore, he will quite unconsciously give to his statements the coloring of his own personal beliefs. In discussing controversial topics, he will with the same unconsciousness lay more stress upon the theories which he holds himself than upon those which are accepted and maintained by other men of equal eminence. Moreover, he is apt to assume upon the reader's part too great a familiarity with the subject, and hence to
