The first fifteen hundred years of the Christian era produced nothing of the slightest value along this line of enlightenment. A fellow-countryman of Saint Augustine, the African Felix Capella, wasted a great many years of his life composing something which he held to be a veritable treasure house of miscellaneous knowledge. In order that people might the more easily retain the many interesting facts which he presented to them, he used poetry. This terrible mass of misinformation was duly learned by heart by eighteen successive generations of medieval children and was held by them to be the last word in the fields of literature, music and science. Two hundred years later a bishop of Sevilla by the name of Isidore wrote an entirely new encyclopedia and after that, the output increased at the regular rate of two for every hundred years. What has become of them all, I do not know. The book-worm (most useful of domestic animals) has possibly acted as our deliverer. If all these volumes had been allowed to survive, there would not be room for anything else on this earth. When at last during the first half of the eighteenth century, Europe experienced a tremendous outbreak of intellectual curiosity, the purveyors of encyclopedias entered into a veritable Paradise. Such books, then as now, were usually compiled by very poor scholars who could live on eight dollars a week and whose personal services counted for less than the money spent upon paper and ink. England especially was a great country for this sort of literature and so it was quite natural that John Mills, a Britisher who lived in Paris, should think of translating the successful “Universal Dictionary” of Ephraim Chambers into the French language that he might peddle his product among the subjects of good King Louis and grow rich. For this purpose he associated himself with a German professor and then approached Lebreton, the king’s printer, to do the actual publishing. To make a long story short, Lebreton, who saw a chance to make a small fortune, deliberately swindled his partner and as soon as he had frozen Mills and the Teuton doctor out of the enterprise, continued to publish the pirated edition on his own account. He called the forthcoming work the “Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire Universel des Arts et des Sciences” and issued a series of beautiful prospectuses with such a tremendous selling appeal that the list of subscribers was soon filled. Then he hired himself a professor of philosophy in the Collège de France to act as his editor-in-chief, bought a lot of paper and awaited results. Unfortunately, the work of writing an encyclopedia did not prove as simple as Lebreton had thought. The professor produced notes but no articles, the subscribers loudly clamored for Volume I and everything was in great disorder.