body of men who habitually use the work and who await the appearance of a complement to its contents. They form the half-million readers whose requirements the editors have had primarily to consider. The endeavour to meet these requirements has been made at a particularly happy moment, for, in nearly all civilized countries, a census was completed just in time to enable the editors and contributors to avail themselves of the latest official statistics. It is not simply in respect of its statistical information that a census yields important material. It affords a large body of fresh facts with regard to public health, commerce, agriculture, and manufacture, the spread of education, and the comparative vitality of various nations, so that articles of many different sorts are far richer and fuller than they could otherwise have been. There is, indeed, no publication other than these new volumes in which the results of this world-wide census are similarly comprised.
To the twenty-four volumes of text in the Ninth Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica there will now be added eleven further volumes containing 10,000 articles by 1000 contributors, 2500 new maps, plates, portraits, and other illustrations; in all about 7000 new pages, the volumes being of the same size as those of the Ninth Edition. The preparation of the new volumes was begun early in 1899, but the first years work was largely devoted to fixing the scope and plan of the work, determining the subjects to be treated, selecting the departmental editors, to the selection by them of the contributors (a choice which could judiciously be made only by men of special technical knowledge), and to the discussions which necessarily preceded the actual task of writing. In order that the various contributions, especially those in which statistics play an important part, or in which new inventions or discoveries are described, should be checked and corrected in the light of the most recent research, all the articles have been carried in type, subject to revision by editors and contributors, and will thus be found to contain information available only a few weeks before they issue from the press. So great is the number of subjects treated in the new volumes, and so thorough their treatment, that only the most zealous goodwill on the part of the contributors has made it possible to keep the new matter within eleven volumes. This limitation was the more difficult, or from another point of view the size of the supplement was the more inevitable, for another reason. In the earlier history of the Encyclopcedia Britannica, we find that biographies of any sort were barely tolerated. In 1776 the third Duke of Buccleuch, who was greatly interested in the project of the second edition, had much difficulty in persuading the editors to include biographical articles, which they deemed " inconsistent with the purpose of a dictionary of arts and sciences." In the case of the new volumes it has been thought necessary, in order to bring the biographical section up to date and to make it as comprehensive as other sections, to include lives of certain living men and women. The policy of the editors in this particular was to select for the most part the lives of those whose positions had become so fixed that, whatever promise of future achievement their continued vigour might give, there was no reason to believe that the general character and purpose of their work would materially change. Among the younger generation, biographies are included of reigning sovereigns or heads of states, and of some few others whose names are already of commanding interest.
A noteworthy feature of the new volumes will be the new and comprehensive index to the completed work, covering under one alphabetization the Ninth Edition and the new volumes. It will contain more than 600,000 entries, and will not only be exceedingly
