which it taxes ordinary powers of divide all nature among themmind merely to realize, and be con- selves; and he desires to exemplify scious of the possible existence of his doctrine by elbowing out of To suppose the Commander-in-Chief becoming also First Lord of the Admiralty, Master-General of the Ordnance, and First Commissioner of Her Majesty's Works, will be but a partial approach to the comprehensive realisation. We must also suppose him directing the functions of the Lord Chancellor, the First Lord of the Treasury, the Home, Foreign, and Colonial Secretaries, the Presidents of the Royal Society and of the Royal Academy, with a few other offices of like kind. Such a troublesome, unruly, crot chety, angular, unconformable set, as such an administrator has to work with, is not easily conceived by those who are accustomed to the discipline and precision of official life. All are self-centred in their own crotchets, and determined to make room for themselves and elbow out all others. Here the conchologist, conscious of no life and interest save in the clammy sea-beach or the tangled recesses of the rocks, whose highest notions of an event or a crisis in life is the pulling-up and emptying of his dredge, shoves his neighbours, the ichthyologist and the paleozoic entomologist out of the way as a couple of quacks, whose pretended science is all humbug in comparison with his own testaceous molluscs. The cryptogamist, or cultivator of the class of beings addicted to clandestine marriages, must have a large space for his algæ, which are of weightier import than all the rest of science put together, since in them we are to study the first germs and laws of vitality, and to find the infant origin, as it were, of the whole busy world of life and action, of growth and decay, of life and death, by which they are surround ed. Here comes a devotee to the doctrine that species are formed by the stronger crushing the weak er, and aggrandising themselves through the roll of ages until they the way all the other devotees around him. Down on all these comes "the practical man," who despises the whole tribe of philosophers, and is all for bricks or leather. A sort of half-breed be. tween both comes forward in the shape of the inventor; he has discovered, say, a plan for blowing up fortresses with India-rubber bombs, and he wants to write the article Ordnance, Artillery, Bomb-ketch, Army, Fortification, War, or any other which will enable him to give prominence to the grandest discovery of our day-the invention that is to be the great crisis in the history of the world. But perhaps the most troublesome of all are the biographers, and for this reason: In the sciences there are men with hobbies, who no doubt will ride them to desperation; but afford them the ordinary locomotive means of the rest of the world, and they will be quite reasonable, going no farther than the prescribed distance, and going no faster than the ordinary pace. But your biographer is apt to get off at all points. It is a specialty in the nature of man which might open a fine field of inquiry to psychological investigators, that whenever man writes the biography of his fellow-man he begins to worship him. Is it because the Life written is the property of the writer, and therefore to be magnified? Is it because the vast acquirements and noble virtues of the object of the laudations throw some slight reflection on the man who writes them? Is it a mere stupid, lazy practice which the tribe of biographers have got into, owing to this, that some lives of great men have been written by their devoted admirers, and other writers who cared nothing whatever about the lives they were doing-who never heard of them till set to the task of writing them, -as the established method of writing J biography? Is it, after all, from the American Revolution. The Life some better method than any of was written by an eminent person these a geniality which lures the of the same surname-Adam Ferhuman being into assimilation with guson, the author of the 'History any other being of the race with of the Roman Republic,' and whom he has had to make acquaint- some other books. Readers of ance, without coming too close to this may not have read either suffer from his badness? Let us his great work or the smaller not anticipate the metaphysicians it is even possible that some of in assigning the cause of the speci- them may not be acquainted with alty. But when it is duly investi- his name. Those, however, who gated, let not one curious phenome- are in this position had better say non be omitted. The French so nothing about it, for he has a place thoroughly accepted the fact, that in literature, both from the capaa biography could be no other than city he brought to bear on Roman laudatory, that the term they ap- history, and the eminence of the plied to it was an éloge-and it literary set he lived in, which inwould be a piece of honesty if our cluded David Hume, Adam Smith, own age and language would use a Robertson, and Carlyle. like term. The literary history of the minor work before us is thus candidly announced in its title Biogra phical Sketch or Memoir of Lieutenant-Colonel Patrick Fergusson, originally intended for the Encyclopædia Britannica,' 8vo, 1817. This is followed by the explanation, that It being the propensity of the biographer at large to magnify his hero, portentous difficulties are doubtless in store for the encyclopædical editor, when a devoted disciple or an attached relation of a departed celebrity undertakes the task of giving him the precise amount of letterpress and lauda"The following biographical tion to which his importance en- sketch was written by Dr. Fer titles him, in comparison with all guson for the purpose of being the other celebrated persons that published in the Encyclopædia Brihave passed into and out of the tannica;' but being considered by world, and all the things in heaven the editor too long for that work, and earth that are comprehended and the Doctor declining to abridge within the arena of human know it, it was not inserted." Accordledge. Editors could no doubt ingly, it begins by giving the tell curious stories about the dif- Colonel his proper alphabetical ference between the space taken by place in the long list in close the contributor in his estimate of vicinity to Ferdusi, Fernando, due proportion, and the estimate Feres, and Ferrei Fergusson, made by the general umpire of Lieutenant-Colonel Patrick." We what he should have taken. There would be some such incompatibility as in the saying about La Harpe, that it would be a good commercial speculation to buy him at his actual market price, and sell him (if one could) at his own estimation of his value. In evidence how far up this propensity may extend, we tender a thin octavo volume, valuable to the collectors of rarities, being the Life of Colonel Fergusson, a gallant officer who fell bravely fighting in the cause of his duty in the war of are told that "he was second son of James Fergusson, Esq., of Pitfour, one of the Senators of the College of Justice and Lords Commissioners of Justiciary in Scotland, by Anne Murray, daughter of Alexander Lord Elibank; and with this descent fortunately united in his own character the calm judg ment and exalted abilities of his father, with the vivacity and genius of his mother's family." Doomed as he was to exclusion, yet it seems he and his friends believed in his successful achievement of an inven tion which, had the world accepted country, and so on-and yet to anof it, would have secured him a swer in detail, through the alpharank among the Congreves, Schrap- bet, whatever question any one, put nells, and Armstrongs. This was to a puzzle in his ordinary read"a new species of rifle, which he ing, desired to ask. And this had could load at the breech without to be done without repetition. It the use of the rammer, and with is easy to see that this requires such quick repetition as to fire care and management. Without seven times in a minute. The venturing to show a sample of it rifleman in the mean time might be stretched at full length on the ground, so as to have the cover of a parapet, behind even a consolidated mole-hill, or the least inequality of the earth's surface." This invention was tried in the presence of royalty, but the firing was very wide. This was attributed to diffidence of the august spectator, and the inventor aptly enough said that the nerves of the performer would not have been so much disturbed by the presence of his majesty's enemies. as well done, it is easy to show how it can be ill done. Suppose that, in the hot fervour of developing some new and grand theory in physical geography, it is essential to you to know on the instant how high the village of Aussig on the Elbe stands above the level of the sea-you must have the information at once, or the ideas, crowding one after another, will make their escape. You dash into the proper place in the mass of fifty or sixty volumes which are your standard works of reference, and there, under the head "Aussig," you are referred for information to "Austrian Empire." This is not far off; but there is not much to be made of it when obtained. It fills a volume, and that volume has no index or contents, or division of any kind. The person who had the special charge of such trifles as Aussig was very safe in sending you where he did, for it would take you a week's reading to enable you to contradict him, and say that, after all, there is not a word about Aussig in the whole treatise. That treatise, indeed, has been written by a great ethnologist, who has devoted himself to the exposition of large views on the balance of the Teutonic and Sclavonic races, and on the influence and counterinfluence which their static condition has had on the preservation and development of the imperial institutions, left as they were, by the overthrow of the Roman empire, to develop themselves in new phases of a homogeneous auThe thing to be done was to tochomy. To these momentous unite the two-provide for the affairs, all his energy, within the reader a full library of all know- limited space allowed to him, is ledge the sum of every science devoted, and he would have no the history and geography of every more idea of going into particulars An encyclopædia is something professing to give instruction in a circle. This will hardly convey a distinctive notion to the mind without some explanations taken from practice. The idea of a philosophi cal work of this kind involves the joint action of the two logical operations, analysis and synthesis. First, you take all human knowledge and analyse it into its component parts -each of these must be treated according to its due proportion. Next, you take every substantive in the dictionary, and every scientific, historical, biographical, and geographical word, and each of these inust have a place. General treatises on all human knowledge had been long in existence, and received a considerable stimulus from the labours of Bacon. Dictionaries also had been long in existence, in which each word was a separate entity, treated without any reference to the position of the thing it represented in the field of human knowledge. and saying anything about Aussig, or any place like it, than of devoting himself to the biography of the very respectable landlord of the Goldene Krone in that romantic little town. The tendency of the encyclopædia towards centralising itself into great treatises on the chief sciences was much encouraged by D'Alembert, Diderot, and the rest of that set who earned for themselves the name of Encyclopædists. D'Alembert was always pottering at what he called Encyclopædial tables, bringing out a Système figuré des connaissances humaines. He professed to found his system on Bacon's; but it is said that this was merely to divert suspicion away from the free-thinking tone which he infused into his classifications. If he and his coadjutors were a little naughty in this way, they certainly were subjected to the direst literary punishment that ever was heard of. To be osten sibly clipped down by the scissors of the censor was bad enough, but nothing to the discovery, just as they were ready to break upon the astonished world with all their powerful originality and contempt for authority, that there was an enemy within their own camp clip. ping away all those bold original passages on which their reputation was to rest. The publisher, in short, was not to risk ruin and the Bastille for things like that; so he quietly, and without any compunction, cut them out of the proofs before these went finally to press, leaving the enraged authors to such recourse as they might find. These were the men who introduced great dissertations on branches of science into encyclopædia practice. No doubt each of these was written by some man of great scientific attainments and of wide reputation. Thus the work became so illustrious. But its general plan is be lieved to have owed many debts to the humbler work of Ephraim Chambers; and still the circle of knowledge had not been completed, for the French Encyclopædists did not include history and biography. If all human knowledge is to be within a given cincture, these must of course go with the rest; but they are in many respects so incompatible with science in a system where a sort of common centre is to be looked for, that it is, after all, questionable whether what deals with the history of men and nations should not be detached from the rest of knowledge. Then a new difficulty occurs in a branch of knowledge stretching between the two, something half of science, half of mere human experience, with some ties to the mathematics and other exact sciences, and a close connection with statistics-namely, Political economy. Indeed, when we suppose all branches of human knowledge to be dealt with in such a work, all to get fair-play, and all to be in some way connected together as meeting in a common centre, the difficulties seem to multiply with the unlimited capacities of man for the acquisition of new knowledge. Every head of division in such an encyclopædia will have hooks fixed into it to draw it to every great department of human knowledge. Take the word Sheep, for instance. The zoologist, let us suppose, has undoubtedly the primary claim, and, all others giving way for the time, takes possession of him as belonging to the genus Ovis, the tribe Capride, the order of Ruminants, and the class of Mammalia. Farming has perhaps the next claim, with its distant opposites of Southdown and Highland Blackface, and the multitude of intermediate distinctions and classifications known to the learned. He whose department is the manufacture of textile fabrics has also something to say, perhaps, about the difference be tween the fibres of animal tissues, which, when examined by the microscope, are seen to have lateral tags which lay hold of each other, while those of vegetable tissues hold together entirely by the twist. His The sheep has a large Perhaps about other characteris- ral in the army, must be supposed tics a devotee of the paleontolo- to have been acquainted with his gical branch of geology has the own profession, but who showed next claim, in virtue of its being by his blundering translation that a matter of importance that the he knew nothing whatever of his, animal's remains have or have not M. Oude's. His pupil, the genial been found in certain stratifications. Soyer, took up the same tone. Leather next comes in; for sheep- practice was in the high arts, and he skin, though abhorred of all book- added to it what great artists have collectors, has an important place sometimes done the recording of in the leather market. Perhaps his own practice of his art, in one of the most curious machines literature in existence is one for splitting part in it. As has been well resheepskins, for the purpose of con- marked, our language presents an verting them into material for mak- enduring memorial of the differing kid gloves. Taking a long stride, ence between the Norman and the we come to the political economist Saxon in the French derivation of and the ethnical philosopher, who the flesh which comes to the table, have a great deal to say about no- and the Saxon name of the animal mad tribes, and about the influence which had to be herded by the son of converting cottage-holdings into sheepwalks. We are not yet done with the claimants. Perhaps pastoral poetry may put in a modest request for consideration. Eikonography will put in a large one, for the agnus is there almost supreme. Then there is heraldry, where we may have to deal with a mouton or, passant regardant. There is a systematic work on the heraldry of fishes. Whether there be or not, impartiality dictates that there ought to be such a work on the heraldry of quadrupeds. There still remains a department, and that by no means the least important. The late illustrious cook, Eustace Oude, in his introductory remarks on his great work, remarked that, no man was more dependent on the proper cultiva tion of his art, or under deeper obligations for the triumphs he had himself accomplished in it, than those persons who, because they happened to be distinguished in other arts or sciences, thought proper to speak disparagingly of his. He complained especially that he had been compelled to undergo the drudgery of acquiring the English language for the purpose of rendering his chief work known to the English people, because it had been translated by a gentleman who, holding the commission of a gene of the soil. Mutton it is, in M. Oude's and M. Soyer's nomenclature; but still it is, both in science and common British phraseology, of or belonging to the sheep. There stands for discussion the question, whether the proper kind of encyclopædia is that which teaches the fundamental parts of all branches of knowledge, or is that which merely gives one an im mediate explanation of all things in heaven and earth in alphabetical order? Perhaps the settlement of this, as of many like questions, may be, that each is good of its kind, and for its own purposes. The scholar and investigator does not, perhaps, consider the purposes for which other persons desire an encyclopædia. They look to it as to a complete library of all knowledge, certified under a competent authority to be sound. They are men with their hands and heads full of practical affairs during the chief hours of their life; they have not time, therefore, to pick and choose among the best instructors in the various departments of human knowledge, but they wish to have it in their power to dip into chemistry, electricity, geology, and other weighty portions of knowledge, and to get at them in perfection, with the latest intelligence and in the best shape. The Encyclopædia |