Excerpt from Johnson's New Universal Cyclopædia, Vol. 1: A Scientific and Popular Treasury of Useful Knowledge; Part I, A-Cavalier

When a new book of general reference is presented for the first time to the public, it becomes its originators to state the reasons which have induced them to undertake the labor of its preparation, and to explain the principles which have guided them in the performance of their task. There are many encyclopaedias already in existence, from the merits of which the present Editors are by no means disposed to detract. They, like most men whose lives are given to study, have made much use of works of this description, and have learned by experience to appreciate their value. But the same experience has taught them that there are certain particulars in which all the works of this class with which they are acquainted are more or less unsatisfactory.

In explanation of what is here meant, it must be premised that no cyclopaedia, however it may be named, can be, in the strictest sense, universal, and that therefore every such work must sometimes fail to respond to the demands of the inquirer. The misfortune is, that the particulars as to which these works are thus occasionally disappointing are too often precisely those on which information is most frequently needed in the ordinary affairs of life. In statistics, for example, they deal much in aggregates and little in details. In geography they are full upon countries, and provinces, and capitals, and populous cities; but whatever lies beyond this they leave to the gazetteers. And while, as to the men whose names have come down to us from other times, the information they furnish leaves little to desire, in regard to those who have made themselves conspicuous among the living gen cration, they are either silent, or their notices are imperfect and few.

But, in the second place, the information which these works contain is often scattered through too large a space: facts of detail, of which the need is immediate and pressing, are So submerged beneath the multitude of words that the hurried inquirer finds his time and his patience alike too limited to permit him to study them out. The works of this class which have cost their editors the largest labor and their publishers the largest outlay - such, for instance, as the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana and the Encyclopaedia Britan nica - have, as a necessary consequence of their ambitious design, and in virtue of the very pains expended in carrying this faithfully out, sacrificed to a great degree their every day usefulness. For quiet perusal, with abundance of leisure, they are invaluable; but they are libraries rather than books of reference. They are in no proper sense dict-ion aries, but groups of systematic treatises loosely linked together; and though their general titles are arranged in alphabetic order, they can only be conveniently consulted for the purposes of occasional reference by the aid of an independent index.

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