PREFACE
THE first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica was prepared by "A Society of Gentlemen in Scotland," as the authors are described on the title-page, and the first weekly section was sold in December 1768 by "Colin Macfarquhar, at his printing office in Nicolson Street," Edinburgh. In 1771 the publication was completed in three volumes quarto, containing 2670 pages and 160 copper plates. From this small beginning the Encyclopaedia Britannica has increased, in size as well as in importance, until the present edition, when completed by the new volumes, to the first of which these words of introduction are prefixed, will include more than 28,000 pages and more than 12,000 plates, maps, and other illustrations. The evolution, during the one hundred and thirty-four intervening years, was gradual. The second edition, containing 8595 pages, was completed in 1784; the third, 14,579 pages, in 1797; the fourth, 16,033 pages, in 1810; the fifth, 16,017 pages, in 1817; the supplement to the fifth edition, 4933 pages, in 1820; the sixth edition, 16,017 pages, in 1823; the seventh, 17,011 pages, in 1842; the eighth, 17,957 pages, in 1861. The first volume of the Ninth Edition was published in 1875, and the last, making a total of 21,572 pages, in 1889; and the continued public recognition of the utility of the Encyclopaedia Britannica is strikingly shown by the fact that of this Ninth Edition more than forty thousand copies have been purchased in the United Kingdom alone during the past four years. The vitality and authority which the Encyclopaedia Britannica has maintained through a period of almost a century and a half may be attributed to two conspicuous and distinctive characteristics, inherent in the purpose, and apparent in the execution, of its successive editions. In the first place, the publishers and the successive editors, from the beginning, brought to the undertaking an elevated view of their task. The Scottish origin of the work imparted to its inception a certain sternness of purpose, and the perfecting of the successive editions has been almost a cult, as well as a business. The second characteristic, the collaboration of distinguished contributors, was at once a corollary of the policy of the editors and a result of the reputation which the Encyclopaedia Britannica so promptly acquired and so firmly retained. The fact has often been cited that in 1812 Dugald Stewart received for one "Philosophical Dissertation," in the supplement to the fifth edition, a sum of £1700, which was then an unprecedented remuneration for such a task, and from that time the cost of obtaining
