Title:  The Nuttall Encyclopaedia Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge

Author:  Edited by Rev. James Wood

Release Date:  May 14, 2004 [EBook #12342]

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ASCII

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Produced by Jonathan Ingram and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.

THE NUTTALL ENCYCLOPAEDIA

BEING

A CONCISE AND COMPREHENSIVE DICTIONARY

OF GENERAL KNOWLEDGE

CONSISTING OF

Over 16,000 terse and original articles on nearly all subjects
discussed in larger encyclopaedias, and specially dealing

WITH SUCH AS COME UNDER THE CATEGORIES

OF

History, biography, geography, literature, philosophy, religion,
science, and art

EDITED BY THE

REV.  JAMES WOOD

Editor of “NUTTALL’S standard dictionary” And compiler of the “Dictionary of quotations”

THE SIXTY-FIRST THOUSAND

1907

PREFACE

“The Nuttall encyclopaedia” is the fruit of a project to provide, in a concise and condensed form, and at a cheap rate, an epitome of the kind of information given in the larger Encyclopaedias, such as may prove sufficient for the ordinary requirements, in that particular, of the generality of people, and especially of such as have not the means for purchasing or the leisure for studying the larger.

An Encyclopaedia is now recognised to be as indispensable a book of reference as a dictionary; for while the latter explains and defines the vehicle of thought, the former seeks to define the subject-matter.  Now the rapid increase in the vocabulary of a nation, which makes the possession of an up-to-date dictionary almost one of the necessaries of life, is evidently due to the vast increase in the number of facts which the language has to describe or interpret; and if it is difficult to keep pace with the growth in the language, it is obviously more difficult to attain even a working knowledge of the array of facts which in this age come before us for discussion.  No man can now peruse even a daily newspaper without being brought face to face with details about questions