The _Penny Cyclopaedia_ had its share of this kind of defect or excellence, according to the way in which the measure is taken. The circumstance is not so much noticed as might be expected, and this because many a person is in the habit of using such a dictionary chiefly with relation to one subject, his own; and more still want it for the pure dictionary purpose, which does not go much beyond the meaning of the word. But the person of full and varied reference feels the differences; and criticism makes capital of them. The Useful Knowledge Society was always odious to the organs of religious bigotry; and one of them, adverting to the fact that geography was treated with great ability, and most unusual fullness, in the _Penny Cyclopaedia_, announced it by making it the sole merit of {287} the work that, with sufficient addition, it would make a tolerably good gazetteer. Some of our readers may still have hanging about them the feelings derived from this old repugnance of a class to all that did not associate direct doctrinal teaching of religion with every attempt to communicate knowledge. I will take one more instance, by way of pointing out the extent to which stupidity can go. If there be an astronomical fact of the telescopic character which, next after Saturn's ring and Jupiter's satellites, was known to all the world, it was the existence of multitudes of double stars, treble stars, etc. A respectable quarterly of the theological cast, which in mercy we refrain from naming, was ignorant of this common knowledge,--imagined that the mention of such systems was a blunder of one of the writers in the _Penny Cyclopaedia_, and lashed the presumed ignorance of the statement in the following words, delivered in April, 1837: "We have forgotten the name of that Sidrophel who lately discovered that the fixed stars were not single stars, but appear in the heavens like soles at Billingsgate, in pairs; while a second astronomer, under the influence of that competition in trade which the political economists tell us is so advantageous to the public, professes to show us, through his superior telescope, that the apparently single stars are really three. Before such wondrous mandarins of science, how continually must _homunculi_ like ourselves keep in the background, lest we come between the wind and their nobility." Certainly these little men ought to have kept in the background; but they did not: and the growing reputation of the work which they assailed has chronicled them in literary history; grubs in amber.