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5,020 volumes, which took forty years in preparation. The maps, 

 plates, plans, &c., are said to be most elaborate ever prepared, 

 and strangely enough, only one hundred copies were issued. I 

 omit Dictionaries as such, though the Oxford Dictionary is really 

 an encyclopaedia, the vast extent of which may be judged from a 

 recent volume which covers only Gre to Gyz, and includes no less 

 than 4,238 words, an indication of the almost hopeless endlessness 

 of the task commenced by Dr. Henry Bradley and Dr. J. A. H. 

 Murray. Even such works as Leslie Stephen's Dictionary of 

 National Biography begun in 1885, and occupying nearly twenty 

 years in its issue, or the ambitious Encyclopaedia of Geography, 

 begun seventy years ago by Hugh Murray with the assistance of 

 Sir W. J. Hooker, Professors Wallace, Jameson, and others, do 

 not stand in the true line of encyclopaedic descent. Aristotle, 

 with his 38 separate treatises, and Theophrastus and others of the 

 ancients, aimed dehberately at being encyclopaedists. Theo- 

 phrastus it was, who first described frictional electricity, as a 

 property of amber. Later, Varro with his 88 volumes, and the 

 elder Pliny with 37 books on Geography, Zoology, Medicine, 

 Magic, &c., assumed the same role, as may be gathered from the 

 title of Varro's lost work "Rerum humanarum et Divinarum 

 Antiquitate. " But these early savans, with compilers like Sto- 

 baeus, Suidas, and Marcianus Capella, were less pioneer encyclo- 

 paedists than the Arabian Al-Farabius, whose MS. in the Escurial 

 at Madrid is said to cover all that was known of the Mathematics 

 and Physics of the time. 



In the Middle Ages the old classical aim was still pursued and 

 ponderous treatises testified to ambitious efforts to embrace all 

 human knowledge in voluminous theses, in which a grain of fact 

 was often hidden in a whole acre of imagination and conjecture. 

 The ^'Speculum Majus" of the Dominican Vincent de Bevais — 

 dated about the middle of the 13th century, is a typical example, 

 and its 10,000 chapters, sub-divided alphabetically, and covering 

 History, Science, Dogmatics, Divinity and Ethics, are prophetic 

 of our modern encyclopaedias. The "Summa Theologiae" of 

 Thomas Aquinas is the most' famous encyclopaedic compilation 

 by a single author, and its orderly arrangement, its countless 

 chapters and sub-divisions, almost strike one with awe, epitom- 

 ising, as it endeavours to do, all earthly knowledge, and much 

 material that is not and never was knowledge at all. In the 

 mediaeval monastic schools the "Summa" of Aquinas was the 



