mes of notables deceased; and, unlike the
Britannica, it further limits its biographies to persons connected by
birth or long residence with the British kingdom. Knowing this fact
before-hand, will save any time wasted in searching the Dictionary of
National Biography for any persons now living, or for any American or
European names.

Another caveat may properly be interposed as regards searches for
information in that most widely advertised and circulated of all works of
reference,--the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The plan of that work was to
furnish the reading public with the very best treatises upon leading
topics in science, history, and literature, by eminent scholars and
specialists in various fields. Pursuant to this general scheme, each
great subject has a most elaborate, and sometimes almost exhaustive
article--as, for example, chemistry, geology, etc., while the minor
divisions of each topic do not appear in the alphabet at all, or appear
only by cross-reference to the generic name under which they are treated.
It results, that while you find, for example, a most extensive article
upon "Anatomy", filling a large part of a volume of the Britannica, you
look in vain in the alphabet for such subjects as "blood, brain,
cartilage, sinew, tissue," etc., which are described only in the article
"Anatomy." This method has to be well comprehended in order for any
reader to make use of this great Cyclopaedia understandingly. Even by the
aid of the English index to the work, issued by its foreign publishers,
the reader who is in hasty quest of information in the Britannica, will
most frequently be baffled by not finding any minor subject in the index.
The English nation, judged by most of the productions of its literary and
scientific men in that field, has small genius for indexing. It was
reserved to an American to prepare and print a thorough index, at once
alphabetical and analytical, to this great English thesaurus of
information--an index ten times more copious, and therefore more useful
to the student, than the meagre one issued in England. This index fills
3,900 closely printed columns, forming the whole of volume 25 of the
Philadelphia edition of the work. By its aid, every name and every topic,
treated anywhere in this vast repository of human knowledge can be traced
out and appropriated; while without it, the Encyclopaedia Britannica,
with all its great merits, must remain very much in the nature of a
sealed boo