ACCURATE DEFINITIONS AND EXPLANATIONS
But how, in the late eighteenth century, in the age before door-to-door salespeople, in the age indeed before the train, was such a hefty, new and ambitious publication to be explained and sold? Principally by newspaper advertisement. Announcing the publication of the first volume in December 1768, a notice in the Caledonian Mercury claimed it would contain ‘ACCURATE DEFINITIONS and EXPLANATIONS of all the Terms as they occur in the Order of the Alphabet’.
This did rather make it sound like a dictionary, and with good reason. The encyclopaedia as we understand it today – a work of reference on a great variety of topics, a gathering of information and instructional articles intended as a summation of contemporary human knowledge – began life primarily as a definition of words.
Between the exhaustive entries on Agriculture and Algebra, for example, there were a great many briefer ones, many of them banal. These included (in their entirety):
AID: In a general sense, denotes any kind of assistance given by one person to another.
AIGHENDALE: The name of a liquid measure used in Lancashire, containing seven quarts.
ALARM-BELL: That rung upon any sudden emergency, as a fire, mutiny, or the like.
Other entries read like the erratic index of an atlas:
ABERYSWITH: A market-town in Wales, lying 199 miles W.S.W. of London, in 52.30 N. lat. and 40.15 W. long.
ANGERMANNIA: A maritime province of Sweden, lying on the western shore of the Bothnic gulph.
Many other entries were anecdotal, whimsical, circumlocutory, contradictory and pointedly subjective. Some were blind alleys. Others, rather than self-evident and brief, may now appear to us excessively detailed, given their subject matter.*
ABESTON: a blundering way of writing Abestus. See Abestus. [There is no entry for Abestus.]
ACRIDOPHAGI: Locust-eaters. A famine frequently rages at Mecca when there is a scarcity of corn in Egypt, which obliges the inhabitants to live upon coarser food than ordinary. The Arabians grind the locusts in hand-mills, or stone mortars, and bake them into cakes, and use these cakes in place of bread. Even when there was no scarcity of corn … they boil them, stew them with butter, and make them into a kind of fricassee, which … is not disagreeably tasted.
ANNUITIES: a sum of money, payable yearly, half-yearly, or quarterly, to continue a certain number of years, for ever, or for life.*
ARMADILLO: in zoology, a synonime of the dasypus. See Dasypus.
DASYPUS: A genus of quadrupeds belonging to the order of Bruta. The dasypus has neither fore-teeth nor dog-teeth; it is covered with a hard bony shell, intersected with distinct moveable zones or belts. This shell covers the head, the neck, the back, the flanks, and extends even to the extremity of the tail; the only parts to which it does not extend are the throat, the breast and the belly, which are covered with a whitish skin of a coarse grain, resembling that of a hen after the feathers are pulled off.
Linnaeus enumerates six species of dasypus, principally distinguished by the number of their moveable belts.
1. The novemcinctus, or dasypus, with nine moveable belts.
2. The unicinctus, or dasypus, with eighteen (
sic
) moveable belts.
3. The trichinous, or dasypus, with three moveable belts.
4. The quadricinctus, or dasypus, with four moveable belts. Linnaeus is mistaken with regard to the trivial name and specific character of this animal; it ought to be called the sexcinctus, or dasypus, with six moveable belts; for, according to Briffonius, Bouffon, and most other natural historians, none of the species of this genus have four moveable belts.
5. The septemcinctus, or dasypus, with seven moveable belts.
6. The dasypus with twelve moveable belts. This is the largest species, being about two feet in length, of dasypus.
Questioning precisely how useful this might be to the general reader – or indeed to the dasypus – would be to miss the point: the information was conceived with expertise, and believed accurate, and so it went into the encyclopaedia. The broader question is: what exactly is an encyclopaedia?
The word entered common usage in the seventeenth century, originating from the Greek notion of enkyklios paideia: ‘learning within the circle’ or ‘all-round education’. This circle would in turn make a well-rounded man, someone versed in all the liberal sciences and practical arts. Previously, such an accretion of knowledge would be experiential, or at least personally taught. Only now, with the enlightened Britannica and some of its European predecessors, was the word encyclopaedia employed to define a book or a set of books that made universal learning possible from one extended text. A complete library was hereby filleted and compressed, and the wisdom of experts was attainable to anyone with a solid grounding in comprehension (or what William Smellie called ‘any man of ordinary parts’) and the financial wherewithal to expand it. (It was no small irony that the principal purchasers of this condensed library were libraries: now even those with limited means could attain information in a concise and direct manner.)
Although the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica had as many strange inclusions as it did odd omissions, it carried two clear messages for its purchasers: buy these volumes and become one of us; read these volumes and take your place in modern society. The cross-referencing of its entries applied equally to its subscribers: the connections, both textual and personal, united its readers in a shared purpose, a desire to contain what was known and could be agreed upon.
Edinburgh was the perfect place for such a project. Its progressive university attracted students and teachers who were leaders in their fields; the university’s self-esteem fomented only greater expertise. The Scottish Enlightenment was born of a large number of humanist individuals (among them the economist Adam Smith, the architect Robert Adam, lawyer and author James Boswell, surgeon John Hunter, philosopher David Hume, botanist Erasmus Darwin and engineer James Watt) who proposed a rationalist, forward-thinking attitude to matters of the intellect; at the dawn of the steam age the educational dominance of the Church was neither an attractive nor workable proposition for these men, all of whom were overtaken by the demands of practical advancement and the rigours of empirical reasoning.
Intellectually, even viscerally, 1768 was a hugely exciting time to be alive. Every possibility was expanding. The great early breakthroughs of the Industrial Revolution had already been made, not least Watt’s early advances with the steam engine and James Hargreaves’s revolution of the cloth trade. In other fields, the philosophies of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume and John Locke were transforming the way we approached scientific argument and moral judgement. But no one was expanding the realms of the possible that year more than Captain James Cook, who embarked on the first of his voyages across the Pacific to New Zealand and Australia a few weeks before the first part of Britannica went to press, and arrived just as the final volume was being completed three years later.
By the time the news of Cook’s discoveries reached Edinburgh, it was clear to Britannica’s founders that their city was home to one other valuable asset: an abundance of avaricious readers, not least at its academic institutions. Britannica was born of market demand, and the market demanded a continually updated version of the world. In 1771, when its publishers claimed every set had been either sold or reserved, and would therefore require a second edition, their creation had become a living, lasting organism.