112 . TRANSACTIONS. 1906-7. 



ceeded to the vacant chair; Lewis Campbell had taken Sellar's 

 place as Professor of Greek, and John Campbell Shairp was Pro- 

 fessor of Humanity, or Latin. In the chair of Mathematics 

 William Fischer was the successor of John Couch Adams. Above 

 all, was Principal John Tulloch, orator, churchman, historian, 

 divine, one of the most commanding figures in the long line of 

 Scotland's ecclesiastical leaders, Vice-Chancellor of the University 

 and Principal of St. Mary's College. If the academic circle into 

 which Professor Baynes was thus admitted was choice, brilliant, 

 and distinguished, St. Andrews' society outside was no less notable, 

 and as Mrs. Oliphant has said, "all these things tended to make 

 the ancient little city the pleasantest and brightest of abiding 

 places. " It was a self-contained University centre with no 

 outside affiliated institutions hanging on to it and vulgarising it, 

 and no Carnegie endowments pauperising its intellectual feasts, 

 and into that charmed circle of scholars, scientists and philoso- 

 phers. Professor Baynes entered to become for over twenty years 

 one of its brightest and most genial members. 



On a later page reference will be made to the literary work 

 accomplished by Professor Baynes, but the encyclopaedia is his 

 main achievement, not only because of its massive character, and 

 its world-wide importance, but because it is a new departure, a 

 work planned on principles not applied so completely to any 

 previous encyclopaedia. It takes its place indeed as the last link 

 in a long, and ancient, and honourable line of encyclopaedic litera- 

 ture, preserving as it does the formal features and arrangement of 

 previous editions. 



A glance at the great encyclopaedias of the past will serve, 

 perhaps, to bring out the point upon which I have laid special 

 emphasis, and to show that the Ninth Edition was a new departure, 

 as I have said, that its editor slavishly followed no predecessor, 

 and that its excellencies and special features owed more than is 

 generally estimated to the gifted and scholarly editor himself. 



The original home of encyclopaedias is generally held to be 

 Alexandria; but China appears to have produced comprehensive 

 summaries of human knowledge of greater antiquity and of more 

 colossal proportions than any in the more western centres, and 

 has indeed continued to do so down to our own time, for the 

 British Museum received a'' copy, in 1878, of a Complete Thesaurus 

 of Literature, Ancient and Modern, (the Kin Ting Ku Kim Tu' Shu 

 tsih Ch'eng) published at Pekin, and consisting of no less than 



