A great many readers in our country have but a very hazy idea of the difference between the political Encyclopaedia, as we may call it, and the _Encyclopedie Methodique_,[463] which we always take to be meant--whether rightly or not we cannot tell--when we hear of the "great French Encyclopaedia." This work, which takes much from its {284} predecessor, professing to correct it, was begun in 1792, and finished in 1832. There are 166 volumes of text, and 6439 plates, which are sometimes incorporated with the text, sometimes make about 40 more volumes. This is still the monster production of the kind; though probably the German Cyclopaedia of Ersch and Gruber,[464] which was begun in 1818, and is still in progress, will beat it in size. The great French work is a collection of dictionaries; it consists of Cyclopaedias of all the separate branches of knowledge. It is not a work, but a collection of works, one or another department is to be bought from time to time; but we never heard of a complete set for sale in one lot. As ships grow longer and longer, the question arises what limit there is to the length. One answer is, that it will never do to try such a length that the stern will be rotten before the prow is finished. This wholesome rule has not been attended to in the matter before us; the earlier parts of the great French work were antiquated before the whole were completed: something of the kind will happen to that of Ersch and Gruber. The production of a great dictionary of either of the kinds is far from an easy task. There is one way of managing the _En_cyclopaedia which has been largely resorted to; indeed, we may say that no such work has been free from it. This plan is to throw all the attention upon the great treatises, and to resort to paste and scissors, or some process of equally easy character, for the smaller articles. However it may be done, it has been the rule that the Encyclopaedia of treatises should have its supplemental Dictionary of a very incomplete character. It is true that the treatises are intended to do a good deal; and that the Index, if it be good, knits the treatises and the dictionary into one whole of reference. Still there are two stools, and between them a great deal will fall to the ground. The dictionary portion of the _Britannica_ is not to be compared with its {285} treatises; the part called Miscellaneous and Lexicographical in the _Metropolitana_[465] is a great failure. The defect is incompleteness. The biographical portion, for example, of the Britannica is very defective: of many names of note in literature and science, which become known to the reader from the treatises, there is no account whatever in the dictionary. So that the reader who has learnt the results of a life in astronomy, for example, must go to some other work to know when that life began and ended. This defect has run through all the editions; it is in the casting of the work.