CHAMBERS'S ENC YCLO P 2ED IA .*
A GOOD Encyclopaedia for 4/. 10s. is a wonderful thing, and this is a very good one, is, for its object, perhaps the best now extant in the language. That object, we take it, is not to exhaust human knowledge, as Coleridge once hoped to do, or to supersede the necessity for a library, but to enable any ordinary man whose knowledge has failed him on any particular point to fill up the gap without too much trouble, loss of time, or expenditure. The range of subjects covered is very great, not perhaps quite " universal," but sufficiently wide to enable purchasers to dispense almost entirely with any other similar book of reference. The Encyclopedia is, for example, a Thesaurus of science, chemical, medical, astronomical, geological, &c., &c., a biographical dictionary, a peerage of celeb- rities, a cyclopwlia of natural history, a manual of beliefs, and a repertory of all that miscellaneous information which everybody is always wanting, and nobody ever can find without a hunt. The amount of information given in each article is usually just suffi- cient to satisfy any inquirer not specially devoted to that inquiry, to make his facts accurate and his mind tolerably clear on any subject on which he is writing, talking, or reading. As a rule, be the subject what it may, the secret creed of the Ismailees, the number of people in York, the principle of a new machine, the place of the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Table of Precedence, or the rules of croquet, if Smith makes an assertion and Brown denies it, the Encyclopedia will enable them to decide in five minutes which is right ; and the questioner must be either a very learned or a very stupid man, if he lays down the article without knowing a little more than he knew before. This ease of reference, the power of dispensing with many heavy books, seems to us the grand quality of an encyclopaedia, and the one in which so many of these compendiums are deficient. Their compilers either attempt too much, or they abandon the grand first principle of all dictionaries, alphabetical arrangement, in favour of indexes, thus
• Chamberis Encyclopedia. Chambers.
compelling the inquirer to consult an additional volume, and the one of all others most certain to be out of the way.
It would be absurd of course for any one man to attempt to review a compilation like this, or even to pass a definite opinion upon the merits of more than a small portion of the work. It is, however, open to us to say that such of the political and theological articles as we have read appear to be carefully and impartially done, —the article " Atonement," for example, is a most creditable pro- duction, though the anti-sacrificial view should have been more fully stated,—that the papers on individuals are extremely fair and full ; and that we have not once in an hour's " dodging " among the miscellaneous work failed to find the answer to the question proposed,—after all, the most popular and most trying test of an encyclopaedia. We are, moreover, assured on high professional authority that the papers on medicine, anatomy, and physiology are models of accurate condensation, contain "quits as much as outsiders can have any need to know ;" and that the same praise can be given to the contributions on astronomy and optics ; and we can say for ourselves that the accounts of Oriental creeds are, considering their length, very remark- able essays, conveying much information which to the ma- jority of Englishmen will be absolutely new. The division which seems to us to have suffered mat from condensation is the topographical. There is a want of clearness in some of the de- scriptions, and we have detected here and there, in the accounts, more especially of Indian places, some defect of accuracy. The account of Bengal, for example, is decidedly obscure, and that of Calcutta contains one or two gross blunders, e.g., the assertions. that the Mutlah is a branch of the Hooghly, —the Mutlah being a deep salt-water creek ; and that it is as far from Calcutta as. Diamond Harbour, when it is not half the distance, being scarcely so near as to make Port Canning the one spot in Bengal which in the event of a maritime war might require fortifying. Messrs. Chambers apologize for certain unavoidable omissions in this. department, and it is, so far as we can ascertain by a short examina- tion, the one which most requires revisal. We would suggest also the addition in any future supplement of a more complete list of books upon each of the subjects touched. Nothing is so difficult to men not residing in a great city as to make a list of the best works known upon any given topic. So difficult is it, that we venture to suggest that an extra volume giving nothing but a list of books upon all the larger subjects of the compilation might be a great popular success. Nothing of the kind that we know of is in existence in an easily accessible form, and it is quite possible to spend weeks in a vain endeavour to obtain a tolerably full account of the published literature of any question, say, for example, a full list of the English, French, and German biographies of Mahomet. There must be, at least, a hundred scholars, librarians, and bibliomaniacs who could assist in the preparation of a volume for which, unless we are greatly mistaken, Messrs. Chambers would find an un- expectedly large demand. Some of the contributors to these volumes, notably those who write on theology, give very good lists ; but many others supply none, and they are all defi- cient in exhaustiveness and in any indication of the com- parative value of the authors named. The addition, too, of even a hundred pages of dates would greatly increase the value of the work, considered as one intended to make all ordinary works of reference superfluous. These additions. could readily be made, for the plan adopted seems not only to justify but to require the issue of supplements once in every two, or at least in every five years. The present one, which forms. the latter half of the tenth volume, is excellently done, and gets. over the standing difficulty of Encyclopaedists,—that they can never quite keep pace with the march of events and thoughts ; but five years hence even this will be too old for many useful purposes.
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