The sixteenth and concluding volume of the “New American Cyclopaedia” brings Messrs. Ripley and Dana to the end of one of the most laborious and important literary works ever undertaken in this country; and the voice of the public, we are sure, will be all but unanimous in congratulating them upon the generally satisfactory manner in which they have performed their task.  The cost of the work, according to a New-York journal, has been over four hundred thousand dollars.  Six years have been spent in its execution, and nearly five hundred writers have been employed to contribute to it.  Naturally, the articles are of very unequal merit; but it is fair to remark that a high standard of scholarship and literary polish has evidently been aimed at, from the first volume to the last, and there is scarcely any point upon which the “New American Cyclopaedia” may not safely challenge comparison with any work of similar pretensions in the English language.

Practically, none of the cyclopaedia previously accessible in our language has now much value.  Such works as “Rees’s,” the “Edinburgh,” the “London,” and the “Penny” Cyclopaedias, the “Encyclopaedia Metropolitana,” and the excellent, though rather brief, “Encyclopedia Americana” of Dr. Francis Lieber, the only one, except the “New American,” ever written in this country, however good in their day, have long been entirely out of date.  The “English Cyclopaedia” of Charles Knight, and the eighth edition of the famous “Encyclopaedia Britannica,” were completed while the work of Messrs. Ripley and Dana was yet in progress; but they are so different from the latter in their scope and execution, and so much more costly, that they can hardly be said to rival it.  The first-named is a revised issue of the old “Penny Cyclopaedia” of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and retains some of the best features of that excellent work.  Its arrangement seems to us peculiarly inconvenient; but its most glaring defect is the lack of American subjects, and the slipshod, unsatisfactory, and inaccurate manner in which the few that are found in it have been treated.  The “Encyclopaedia Britannica” is open to the same objection.  The first edition of this great work appeared over ninety years ago.  It contained neither historical, biographical, nor geographical articles, and was rather a collection of treatises on the principal arts and sciences than a cyclopaedia in the common acceptation of the term.  It has since been five times almost remodelled, arranged alphabetically, and greatly enlarged; but it still preserves its old distinguishing feature of treating great scientific and historical subjects exhaustively under a single head:  for instance, there are two elaborate historical articles on “Britain” and “England,” but none on Charles I. or Charles II.; long articles on “Animal Kingdom” and “Mammalia,”—­so long, in fact, that it is almost impossible to find anything in them without an index,—­but none on the