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ORGANIZATION

OF THE

STAFF OF EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS,

SHOWING IN PART THE

Distribution of Subjects among the Editorial Staff and Special Contributors.

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Alaska and the Yukon River,

Mines and Mining, Homestead Laws,

Universal Languages,

Iron and Iron Manufactures,

Political Economy, Trusts,

Wool and Woolen Manufactures,

Sugar and Sorghum,

Coal and Coal Production in the U. S.,

Botany and Vegetable Physiology,

Geology,

Oceans and Ocean Currents,

CHARLES E. SAJOUS.

ALPHEUS SPRING PACKARD.

DANIEL DORCHESTER.

CLARENCE COOK.
DUDLEY BUCK.
HENRY MARTYN PAUL.

THOMAS SARGENT PERRY.
GEORGE G. REYNOLDS.
JOHN CLARK RIDPATH.
CLEVELAND ABBE.

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A. M. WELLINGTON. ENOCH L. FANCHER. CHARLES MORRIS. FREDERICK SCHWATKA.

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JAMES FURMAN KEMP.

DANIEL DORCHESTER, JR.

CARROLL D. WRIGHT. PERRY COLLIER. P. W. SHEAFER. DANIEL CADY EATON. HENRY S. WILLIAMS.

WILLIAM H. DALL. GEORGE C. HURLBUT. CHARLES A. SCHOTT. CHARLES W. GREENE. ALEXANDER WINCHELL.

THEODORE LEDYARD CUYLER. WILLIAM TOD HELMUTH.

CLARENCE E. DUTTON.

GEORGE CHASE.
BONAMY PRICE.

W. P. TROWBRIDGE.
J. MACDONALD OXLEY.
SILAS H. DOUGLAS.
J. W. RICHARD.
FREDERICK MAYER BIRD.
CHARLES CHAILLE LONG.
AMOS EMERSON DOLBEAR.

ROMEYN BECK AYRES. ROBERT B. BEATH. GEORGE WALLACE MELVILLE.

GEORGE

C. M. WOODWARD. THOMAS ARMITAGE.

DANIEL CURRY.
JAMES B. EADS.

WILLIAM STODDART.

JOHN F. HURST.

* A limited number of biographical notices of contemporary musicians were not written by Mr. Buck.

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THE appearance of the Standard American Encyclopedia calls for a brief explanation of the reason therefor and the general features of the work. It is appropriate that the publishers of such a work should take their patrons and the general public into confidence and explain the nature of the enterprise in which they have engaged.

This age may be defined as the epoch of the Encyclopedia. More than a hundred years have elapsed since the first work under the title of encyclopedia appeared in Western Europe. In the East the Arabian scholars long before the eighteenth century had projected the Encyclopædia Arabica-a work erudite in the highest degree according to the standards of the Middle Ages, but of interminable extent. The French savans, just before the Revolution of 1789, produced the Encyclopédie Francaise, and the opposing school of philosophers brought out the Encyclopédie Methodique. These two works became models of all that followed in French and German and English. On this pattern was constructed the original edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, and all the subsequent eight editions of that work have been like the original in plan and scope.

Out of the general conditions of the age has sprung a great demand in the United States for works of reference. Such works have multiplied to a great extent, and in recent years hardly a twelvemonth has gone by without the announcement of some new claimant to public favor. Nor is this fact without its explanation and basis of common sense. The conditions of knowledge are constantly changing. It has become the custom of all civilized nations to make decennial censuses, in which are recorded the progress and development of each in industries, arts, and population. This progress no literary work can record in advance. Encyclopedic literature is not a prophecy, but a retrospect. A constant revision and emendation of the old learning is thus made necessary in order that the new learning may fairly reflect the condition of mankind.

The Standard American Encyclopedia has been suggested by these necessities of a progressive age. No other work has been more literally and truly the result of a popular need. The necessity for its production has not been a long-standing, but rather a recent and urgent, demand for a new encyclopedic publication. The work is a necessity which has been born out of the stirring times in which we live.

The old works of reference to which we have referred above have been, as a rule, for the learned only. They were designed for scholars and philosophers. They were of prodigious extent, discursive in the style of composition, and altogether above the level of the people. Even by the standard of erudition these works have been of such dimensions and style as to put them forever beyond the reach of common men. The masses of mankind who live and labor, and make the world what it is can have little in common with the huge monuments

ANNOUNCEMENT BY THE PUBLISHERS.

that have gone by the name of encyclopedias. The people of a great republican democracy, like that of America, could never hope in the use of such works to do more than walk along the shore of knowledge or fathom the shoaler waters; all the profound and abstruse parts have been, and are, beyond the sounding line of any ordinary intelligence.

The endeavor to supply these old and interminable works of learning to the busy and eager people of America has been precisely analogous to the effort made by the past to transplant into our country other European institutions, such as monarchy, feudalism, socialism, and the like. And yet until recent years no one has made an effort to break away from the impossible cyclopedias of the eighteenth century. Until within a limited period no one has tried to find or invent something better, something more American.

Out of this condition has come the Standard American Encyclopedia. It has been a product of the common sense of the age. It has average intelligence for its parent. It presents itself as a claimant for public favor on the distinct ground that it is a work adapted to popular wants and interests. It assumes to compete with the mammoth European encyclopedias and to take their place on the score of its precise adaptability to the needs of the average American citizen and the families of American citizens of all classes and stations. This is the distinct claim of the Standard American Encyclopedia, and the claim cannot be successfully controverted by its rivals.

The contributors to the Standard American Encyclopedia have literally wrought out the work on the line of the demands and conditions of the epoch. These demands and conditions have called for a concise but authentic, a brief but comprehensive dictionary of universal knowledge written in the language of the people, stripped of all superfluity, and issued with such ample aids of illustration as to make it the favorite reference book of all classes of readers.

The supreme excellence in a cyclopedia is authenticity. Its subject-matter must be authentic in order to be valuable. The facts and principles which are embodied must be true facts and principles, else they are worse than nothing. To secure this first and most important end in a work of reference the authors and compilers of it must be men of learning, of honest purpose, and of established literary reputation.

The promoters of the Standard American Encyclopedia have sought diligently to secure a corps of writers whose scholarship is beyond question, whose industry is undoubted, and whose reputation is acknowledged in the world of letters. They are men who are imbued with a sense of the great task imposed upon them, and who are in hearty sympathy with the work, knowing its scope and appreciating its peculiar features.

In securing such contributors the managers have been fortunate to a degree; for they have selected the most capable scholars and writers. John Clark Ridpath, A.M., LL.D., has been chosen supervising editor. He has brought to the discharge of his responsibilities a ripe scholarship and the greatest diligence. His reputation as an historian and scholar and thinker is coextensive with the United States. Indeed, wherever the English language is spoken his historical works have carried his fame and influence in the world of letters. He possesses a clear apprehension of the great edifice which as architect he has supervised. His competency for the task imposed upon him cannot be questioned by any. With the editorin-chief are associated a large number of distinguished writers and authors.

The Standard American Encyclopedia is, as the name implies, a cyclopedia for the nation. More than any other work of its kind it popularizes knowledge and makes it accessible to ordinary readers. This is done without the slightest sacrifice of scholarship. The people, as well as the learned classes, read and understand this work and profit by it. The reader is

ANNOUNCEMENT BY THE PUBLISHERS.

not put to wondering, but is instructed. There is little in the Standard American Encyclopedia that is beyond the reach of any intelligent man. The method of the work is such as to lead the reader on easily and naturally from the unknown to the known. Even those topics which belong to the profounder sciences and to the higher branches of abstruse learning are so simplified in this work as to make them the property of all. The various arts and inventions are explained in a way that, while exact and scholarly, makes easy the understanding of every subject. The topics are not only reduced in treatment to the smallest compass compatible with clearness, but they are treated with such precision and comprehensiveness as to teach, and to entertain while teaching, the average reader. Other cyclopedias are consulted by scholars only; the Standard American is read, not only by scholars, but by the common people as well.

The leading features of a cyclopedia ought to make it distinct from all other works of the kind. The striking characteristics of a book of reference should give it a sort of individuality as well marked as the individuality of a man or an institution. The Standard American Encyclopedia has such features, and they distinguish the work from every other. They are features of peculiar excellence, making the work of incomparable merit.

The

1. Brevity. In our age to be brief is everything; to be tedious is to be nothing. typical cyclopedia is not only recondite, it is tedious. The articles are written in a discur sive and essay like manner. The authors wander from the subject, get on divergent lines of investigation, and lose the reader in the clouds. It is literally true that on account of prolixity and merely speculative methods of treatment the old European cyclopedias lead the investigator away from the real mine of truth and fact as often as they lead him to it.

From this method the Standard American Encyclopedia departs by a whole horizon. Brevity in treatment suggests and compels the author of each article to come directly and immediately to the gist of the subject--to the very heart and marrow of it-and to cast off every superfluity. Not a sentence or a word is here used that may be spared in the clear elucidation of the theme.

2. Conciseness. Out of brevity another quality arises, of equal importance in a cyclopedia-conciseness. It is not sufficient that a cyclopedia article be brief, for it may be that and yet not be adequate. The language and the method must be concise. Such phraseology must be chosen as will exactly and perfectly convey to the reader a ready knowledge of the subject under discussion-that, and no more. It is a striking feature of the work in the Standard American Encyclopedia that it is both brief and concise. The articles are of such limited extent as to bring them quickly to the reader's apprehension and perfectly to his understanding.

3. Comprehensiveness. The method of a true cyclopedia must in the nature of the case be comprehensive. Lacking in this respect, it lacks an essential. An anatomical drawing of the skeleton of bird, or beast, or man must show or suggest the whole. If it lacks some of the structure, as of ribs, or vertebræ, or limbs, it is fatally defective. So also of an expository article. If it omits any essential, if it drops from consideration any vital part, if it does not present at least an outline of the whole, it is wanting in that comprehensiveness which is one of the first requisites of a genuine article for a cyclopedia. The Standard American is in this respect a model. It is as comprehensive as it is brief and concise. It includes a greater number of topics, each topic more carefully delineated as a whole, than does any other cyclopedia in the language. No subject in the vast range of human inquiry is omitted, and scarcely one article omits in treatment such outline of the whole as to give the reader an adequate knowledge of it in its entirety.

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