no EncydopcecUas, Kc. [Chap. XXIV. 



an Enqjclopctdia, which has been since generally 

 employed to designate works of" this class. After 

 Acquaviva, no literary labourer seems to have 

 engaged in so hardy an enterprise, until Alste- 

 dius, a German protestant divine, who, in the 

 beginning of the seventeenth century, published 

 ati Enc\xlopasdia, which Was highly esteemed 

 even among catholics. It was printed at LyoiiS;^ 

 and had much circulation over a considerable 

 part of the continent of Europe. These appear 

 to have been the most important, if not the whole, 

 of the works of this kind \\ hich appeared prior to 

 the eighteenth century; for the Dictionaries of 

 Bayle and Moreri, published towards the close 

 of the preceding age, though works of great la- 

 bour and learning, yet being chiefly of a biogra- 

 phical and historical nature, can scarcely have a 

 place assigned them, with propriety, in the pre-^ 

 sent list. 



About the beginning of the eighteenth cen- 

 tury *, Dr. John Harris, an English clergyman 

 of distinguished erudition, published his Lexicon 

 Technicum, a work in two volumes folio, em- 

 bracing a great variety of knowledge as it then 

 stood, and at that period highly instructive and 

 much esteemed. The next compilation of this 

 kind was that produced by Mr. Ephraim Cham- 

 bers, also of Great Britain, which first appeared 

 in 1728, in two volumes folio, and was doubtless 

 much superior to all that had gone before it. 



* It is be fieved that Dr. Harris's ^vork was first published in 

 i70-t, the fifth edition of it is dated 1736. 



