Lord Rayleigh, the Chancellor of the University of Cam- bridge,
presided at a dinner given on Friday week to celebrate the publication by the University of the eleventh edition of the "Encyclopaedia Britannica." Mr. S. H. Butcher observed that, whereas the first edition a hundred and forty years ago was issued in three volumes, the new one would be in twenty-eight, containing twenty-six thousand pages and forty thousand articles by more than fifteen hundred con- tributors. Mr. Butcher went on to remark that the most striking characteristic of the new Encyclopaedia was that the whole of it was to be issued simultaneously. In previous issues the earlier volumes were out of date before the later ones bad appeared. "Now for the first time the book, though of immense variety, was a unit." After alluding to the remarkable list of contributors, Mr. Butcher concluded by expressing the hope that "by possessing and controlling such a book as this Cambridge might become more than it had ever been in the past,—an inspiring centre of world-wide hitellectual life, and able to carry out not only its national but also its international function."
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