separate animals.  For the scholar, this plan, perhaps, has its advantages; but, for the unlearned reader, who turns to his cyclopaedia to find an intelligible account of the habits of some particular creature, without caring greatly what its precise place may be in the zooelogical kingdom, or looks for a name without knowing whether it belongs to a fish or a river, no book that professes to be a manual of reference could well be arranged on a more inconvenient principle.  One of the chief duties of a cyclopaedia is to save trouble,—­to put one on the high-road to knowledge, without unnecessary delay in finding the guide-boards.  But send a half-educated man to look for a scrap of learning in an article of a hundred pages, and one might as well at once turn him loose into a library.  And what is worse, the unwieldy dimensions of these great articles are out of all proportion to the information they contain.  We venture to assert that the ponderous “Encyclopaedia Britannica,” with its twenty-two quarto volumes, will tell less, for instance, about the Horse, or about Louis XIV., than the much smaller work of Messrs. Ripley and Dana.  In the “New American Cyclopaedia” there are few articles over twenty pages long.  The leading subjects in the sciences, such as “Anatomy,” “Botany,” “Physiology,” etc., have from three to ten pages each,—­enough to give an outline of the principles and history of the science.  The great geographical and political divisions of the globe are treated at somewhat greater length.  Every important plant, beast, bird, and fish, every large town, river, lake, province, and mountain, every notable monarch, and every great battle, (not forgetting “Bull Run” and the “Chickahominy Campaign,”) is the subject of a separate article.

Next to this very convenient subdivision of topics, the most striking merit of the new cyclopaedia is, perhaps, comprehensiveness.  Among its faults, very few faults of omission can fairly be charged; and, indeed, it seems to us rather to err in giving too many articles, especially on American second-rate preachers, politicians, and literary men, all of whom are no doubt ticketed for immortality by a select circle of friends and admirers, but in whom the public at large take the faintest possible interest.  On the other hand, the space given to such heroes is small; and so long as they do not exclude more valuable matter, but only add a little to the bulk of the volumes, they do no great harm, and may chance to be useful.  In the department of natural history this work is much fuller than any other general dictionary.  It is also especially complete in technology and law, (the latter department having been under the care of Professor Theophilus Parsons,) and sufficiently so in medicine, theology, and other branches of science.