PREFATORY NOTE
THE Encyclopædia Britannica, of which the Eleventh edition is now issued by the University of Cambridge, has a history extending over 140 years. The First Edition, in three quarto volumes, was issued in weekly numbers (price 6d. each) from 1768 to 1771, by “a Society of Gentlemen in Scotland.” The proprietors were Colin MacFarquhar, an Edinburgh printer, and Andrew Bell, the principal Scottish engraver of that day. It seems that MacFarquhar, a man of wide knowledge and excellent judgment, was the real originator of the work, though his want of capital prevented his undertaking it by himself. The work was edited and in great part written by William Smellie, another Edinburgh printer, who was bold enough to undertake “fifteen capital sciences” for his own share. The numerous plates were engraved by Bell so admirably that some of them have been reproduced in every edition down to the present one.
The plan of the work differed from all preceding “dictionaries of arts and sciences,” as encyclopædias were usually called until then in Great Britain; it combined the plan of Dennis de Coetlogon (1745) with that in common use—on the one hand keeping important subjects together, and on the other facilitating reference by numerous and short separate articles arranged in alphabetical order. Though the infant Encyclopædia Britannica omitted the whole field of history and biography as beneath the dignity of encyclopædias, it speedily acquired sufficient popularity to justify the preparation of a new edition on a much larger scale. The decision to include history and biography caused the secession of Smellie; but MacFarquhar himself edited the work, with the assistance of James Tytler, famous as the first Scottish aeronaut, and for the first time produced an encyclopædia which covered the whole field of human knowledge. This Second Edition was issued in numbers from June 1777 to September 1784, and was afterwards bound up in ten quarto volumes, containing (8595 pages and 340 plates) more than three times as much material as the First Edition.
These earliest editions of the Encyclopædia Britannica consisted mainly of what may be described as compilation; like all their predecessors, from the time of Alsted to that of Ephraim Chambers, they had been put together by one or two men who were still able to take the whole of human knowledge for their province. It was with the Third Edition that the plan of drawing on specialist learning, which has since given the Encylopædia Britannica its high reputation, was first adopted. This edition, which was begun in 1788 and completed, in eighteen volumes, in 1797, was edited by MacFarquhar until his death in 1793, when about two-thirds of the work were completed. Bell, the surviving proprietor, then appointed George Gleig—afterwards Bishop of Brechin—as
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