The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 45, July, 1861: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
General
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 45, July, 1861: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
The poor wretch who stumbled upon an immortality of infamy by murdering
him died at the same instant. The two stand in the light of that
event--clearly revealed--types of the two systems in conflict to-day:
the one, brave, refined, courtly, generous, tender, and true; the other,
not lacking in brute courage, reckless, besotted, ignorant, and cruel.
Let the two systems, Freedom and Slavery, stand thus typified forever,
in the red light of that dawn, as on a Mount of Transfiguration. I
believe that may solve the dark mystery why Ellsworth died.
REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.
_Chambers's Encyclopaedia: A Dictionary of Universal Knowledge for
the People; on the Basis of the Latest Edition of the German
Conversations-Lexicon_. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co. Vols. I. and
II.
An Encyclopaedia is both a luxury and a necessity. Few readers now
collect a library, however scant, without including one of some sort.
Many of them, even in the absence of all other books, of themselves
constitute a complete library. The Britannica, Edinburgh, Metropolitana,
English, Penny, London, Oxford, and that of Kees, are most elaborate
works, extending respectively to about a score of heavy volumes,
averaging eight or nine hundred pages each. Such publications must
necessarily be expensive. They are, moreover, to be regarded rather as a
collection of exhaustive treatises,--great prominence being given to
the physical and mathematical sciences, and to general history. For
instance, in the Britannica, the publication of the eighth edition
of which is just completed, the length of some of the articles is as
follows: Astronomy, 155 quarto pages; Chemistry, 88; Electricity, 104;
Hydrodynamics, 119; Optics, 176; Mammalia, 120; Ichthyology, 151;
Entomology, 265; Britain, 300; England, 136; France, 284. Each one of
these papers is equal to a large octavo volume; some of them would
occupy several volumes; and the entire work, containing a collection of
such articles, can be regarded in no other light than as an attempted
exhibition of the sum of human knowledge, commending itself, of course,
to professional and highly educated minds, but far transcending, in
extent and costliness, the requirements and the means of the great class
of general readers. For the wants of this latter class a different sort
of work is desirable, which shall be cheaper in price, less exhaustive
in its method, and more diversified in its range. In these particulars
the Germans seem to have hit upon the happy medium in their famous
"Conversations-Lexicon," which has passed through a great many editions,
and been translated into the principal languages of Europe. This is
taken as the type, and in some respects as the basis, of the present
publication,--there being engrafted upon it new contributions from
leading authors of this and other countries, together with such
extensive improvements, revisals, rewritings, additions, and
modifications throughout, as to constitute a substantially new work,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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