28th March.
THE entirely successful device adopted not long ago by the London "Times " to distribute a large edition of the " Encyclopedia Britannica a device first practised in the United States, but now always alluded to by imitators as "The "Times* plan has in the course of its journeying, round the world, at last teache Shanghai. The great cost of the "Encyclopedia " had up to that time restricted its circulation to rich men and public libraries; the so-called Times' plan" sent it into thousands of houses that had never seriously contemplated before the possibility of acquiring it. To sell an expensive book by instalment is an old device; the parts or volumes were published at intervals, and payment required for each part or volume as delivered, The result of this system was that England is full ofincomplete sets—odd volumes being lost or payments not kept up—of uninteresting works; and in many private libraries are' to be found stowed away these fragmentary sets of what Charles Lamb called books that are no books, the class to which these too often properly belonged. The great merit, and the great source of success, of the new plan is that it is founded in confidence in the general honesty of humanity. For the sum of $20 down, and an engagement to go on paying $20 a month for seventeen months, the purchaser receives at once the whole thirty-five volumes, and it is his own fault if be does not get twenty dollars' worth a month of information out of it, besides having it for his very own at the end of the time.
It is claimed with much reason that the "Encyclopedia Britannica," if by any possibility it were obliterated from the world, could never be replaced. T inal publishers The ori, enlisted in its compilation the master minds of the day, and they wrote, as is pointed out in the enlarged prospects, "from special knowledge which no living man possesses, Although the passage of time has brought a lack of completeness to the ninth edition, and although that edition urgently needed the great number of new articles which are now being incorporated with its contents, the existing volumes nevertheless contain thousands of pages which were recognised as matchless when they were. first published, and remain to-day unmatchable." Where as knowledge they may be obsolete, they will live as literature, _libray in itself—to sond $20 to the terms. agreed on Municipal Council, ips Britanngea" is 'a. very Ege res On te, bare geese local agents; but if he is still in doubt, he should send for the books of speci- #4 at last we are to have wight the Aeaieipa!
Coun men pages, ete, and if he can afford the monthly sum of twenty depreciate ed dollars, he will hesitate no longer. The one book, representing the old ninth edition, is only a small one of some 30 odd pages; the other is a really valuable volume of 174 pages strongly bound in stiff boards, and both are full of interesting extracts, maps, diagrams, and pictures, plain and coloured, It may be noted that the maps appear to be made in America; the specimen given. No 56, is identical with No, 112 in the "Century Dictionary," published at New York in January 1899. This produces a certain inconsistency; for instance, in English we write "Cameroon," on this map it is spelt "Kamerun." We write of the "Congo" Free State; according to this map it is "Kongo." There is another amusing slip; in the "Century Dictionary" this map is numbered, as we have said, 112, and there is a note on it: "For further explanations see maps No. 110 and 111," and the note is retained in this Eneyclopzedia, though the map is now numbered 56, This isa very trivial blemish; but we expected absolute impeccability in a monumental work like this. There is one other criticism to make; the portraits are mainly from woorlents, which are generally ver worn, and it would have been worth while to re-engrave them.
These are spots on the sun, and whoever gets the ninth edition of this book with the eleven new volumes will have at his disposal a record of everything that was known to man at the opening of the twentieth century; and to enable him to use this vast warehouse of knowledge, he is provided with an index covering under one alphubetisation the whole thirty-five volumes. Finally, if we have spoken disparagingly of the portraits, we have nothing but praise for the process and coloured plates, and a word should be said for the clearness and completeness of the maps.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.