The second edition (1777-83) of the Encyclopædia Britannica was a ten-volume encyclopedia published in Edinburgh, Scotland. It was spearheaded by the publishers of the first edition, Colin Macfarquhar and Andrew Bell. Like the first edition, it was published serially over a period of years. Most of the medical and scientific articles, as well as the minor articles, were compiled by James Tytler. All the copperplates were engraved by Bell.
Publication The modest success of the first edition determined Macfarquhar and Bell, the publishers, to undertake a second edition in 1777. To help finance it, they joined a consortium with eight other Scottish publishers, including Charles Elliot, who played a critical role in disseminating the work.Kathleen Hardesty Doig et al., “James Tytler’s Edition (1777-84): A Vast Expansion and Improvement,” in The Early Britannica (1768-1803): The Growth of an Outstanding Encyclopedia, ed. Frank A. Kafker and Jeff Loveland (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2009), 70-71.
As of June 1777, Bell and Macfarquhar were still contemplating an edition comprising a hundred weekly installments, exactly the same number that went into the first edition. Now, however, they set the price at 1 shilling per installment, far more than the 6-8 pence demanded for installments of the first edition.Doig et al., “James Tytler’s Edition," 70.
In the course of publication, the second edition expanded well beyond the publishers' initial projection. In the end, it was published in 181 numbers from 21 June 1777 to 18 September 1784. Bound together in ten volumes dated 1778-83 (even though publication stretched in 1784), it boasted more than 8,000 sloppily numbered pages and about 342 plates. In 1784, it cost 10 pounds, 10 shillings in boards.Doig et al., "James Tytler's Edition," 70-71, 77, 146.
Vol 1. A-AST (1778); Vol 2. AST-BZO (1778); Vol 3. C-CZO (1778); Vol 4. D-FUZ (1779); Vol 5. G-JYN (1780); Vol 6. K-MED (1780); Vol 7. MED-OPT (1781); Vol 8. OPT-POE (1781); Vol 9. POG-SCU (1782); Vol 10. SCU-ZYG, plus a 199-page "Appendix: Containing Articles Omitted"
Collaborators and compilation Unlike the first edition, the second edition was not ascribed to a "society of gentlemen." Nor was it ascribed to Tytler, the anonymous compiler.
As late as 1777, Smellie, the compiler of the first edition, had been considering working with the publishers on the second edition, but he finally declined, partly because he objected to the addition of biographical articles. Instead, the publishers recruited the financially struggling writer, printer, and surgeon-apothecary James Tytler, who was willing to work for about 16 shillings per week, less than Smellie had earned.Doig et al., "James Tytler's Edition," 71-74. Tytler was a polymath, educated by his father in classic languages, and at the University Edinburgh in medicine and other subjects, though he never completed a degree.Stephen Brown, "James Tytler's Misadventures in the Late Eighteenth-Century Edinburgh Book Trade," in Printing Places: Locations of Book Production and Distribution since 1500, ed. John Hinks and Catherine Armstrong (New Castle: Oak Knoll Press, 2005), 48-49. The Scottish poet Robert Burns later portrayed the man he plausibly deemed responsible for most of the second edition in the following terms:
On subjects he knew well, Tytler sometimes presented his own views. Having served as a surgeon on a whaling ship in 1765, for example, he drew on his personal experiences for articles on whales and whaling. Some of this material survived in editions of the Britannica through the mid-nineteenth century, serving as a source for Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick (1851).Brown, "James Tytler's Misadventures," 54.
In 1796, Tytler claimed to have written "Aurora Borealis," "Chemistry," "Cold," "Deluge," "Earthquake," "Electricity," "Fire," "Fire-Ball," "Flame," "Heat," "Ignition," "Lightning," and "Meteorology" for the Britannica, although he may have been referring to the third edition. Regardless, we should not overestimate the nature of his authorship. "Electricity," for example, featured long sections of borrowed text in both editions.Doig et al., "James Tytler's Edition," 100-01.
For the most part, then, and especially on the subjects he was least familiar with, Tytler compiled the second edition by copying and pasting from contemporary sources. For example, in articles related to law, such as "Corporation," he took large sections of text from William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England.Doig et al., "James Tytler's Edition," 90. In compiling the many biographical articles, he borrowed heavily from Biographia Britannica and other sources, often copying word-for-word.Doig et al., "James Tytler's Edition, 81.
At least a few others contributed to the second edition as well. In the Supplement to the third edition (1801), the following quote appears in the article "Blacklock (Dr. Thomas)":
These claims appear plausible, since George Gleig, the editor of the Supplement, probably got his information from Bell or Macfarquhar.
In addition, the chart at the end of "History" is attributed to Adam Ferguson; part of the article "Logarithms" was "communicated" by an Irishman named Thomas Atkinson; and the article "Skating" expressed thanks to an anonymous member of the Skating Club of Edinburgh for contributing to it.Doig et al., "James Tytler's Edition," 76.
Organization, structure, and scope Treatises Like the first edition of the Britannica, the second edition was organized in a still novel manner in which typographically distinct "treatises" on arts and sciences were placed in a single alphabetical sequence alongside normal articles. Specifically, the second edition offered seventy-two treatises, almost twice as many as the first edition had. Eight of them extended to a hundred pages or more, and two were longer than any treatise in the first edition: "Medicine" (304 pages) and "Optics" (169 pages).Jeff Loveland, “Unifying Knowledge and Dividing Disciplines: The Development of Treatises in the Encyclopaedia Britannica,” Book History 9 (2006): 57-87. Three of them, "Medicine," "Optics," and "Pharmacy," came with their own index.Doig et al., "James Tytler's Edition," 78.
Appendix A 199-page supplement to the second edition appeared at the end of volume 10, entitled "Appendix: Containing Articles Omitted, and Others (Marked Encycl.) Further Explained or Improved; Together with Corrections of Errors and of Wrong References." It lacked its own title page, the pagination continuing from 8996 to 9195. Similar appendices had been published at the end of other encyclopedias, but not at the end of the first edition of the Britannica.
The supplement included articles such as "Entomology," "Gentoos" (on Hindus), "Ichthyology," and "Weather" as well as many new biographies, including one of the explorer James Cook. By one of the conventions of contemporary encyclopedia-making, individuals were usually only given a biographical article after their death.Jeff Loveland, "When History caught up with Historians: Biographies of Contemporaries in Encyclopedias, 1674-1750," Eighteenth-Century Life 45 (2021): 47-74. Cook had died in February 1779, too late to be covered in the volume for "C" (1778). The appendix also supplemented an earlier article on air with twenty-six new pages. Most of them were devoted the evolving science of air, with references to the experiments of Joseph Priestley and Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, but the last nine pages report on air balloons, which had been used to raise humans since 1783 and developed into a cultural craze, "balloonomania."Paul Keen, “The ‘Balloonomania’: Science and Spectacle in 1780s England,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 39 (2006): 509-16. This was a passion of Tytler's, one that led him to make several, mostly unsuccessful balloon flights starting 1784 and 1785.Doig et al., "James Tytler's Edition," 151-52. Lastly, the appendix had ten plates, numbered CCCXIV to CCCXXIII. With over 1100 pages, volume 10 was thus thicker than the others, each of which had around 800 pages.
Scope The first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica had been subtitled A Dictionary of Arts and Sciences. This was a reference to type of dictionary (or, in our terms, encyclopedia) that had developed in the late seventeenth century. In principle, dictionaries of the arts and sciences dealt with disciplines with a systematic structure and not with the simple facts of history or geography.Richard Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 12-18. By including thousands of geographical articles, the first edition had already strayed from the ideal of the dictionary of arts and sciences. By strengthening its coverage of geography and history and by allowing for biographical articles, the second edition of the Britannica continued the trend, which it acknowledged in a subtle way by using the subtitle A Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, &c. The Britannica'''s scope was now comparable to that of most general encyclopedias of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Contents
Accuracy From today's perspective, much of the information in the second edition is archaic. For example, the treatise "Chemistry" affirms the existence of "phlogiston," a substance that Lavoisier and the "new" chemists were in the process of discrediting in the late eighteenth century. Copied from the first edition, along with the plate, the article "Ark" details the architecture of Noah's Ark, and the article "History" includes a timeline of history, credited to Ferguson, that begins with the Biblical Flood and numbers years from the Biblical creation of the world, giving the Nativity of Jesus as the year 4004. Many of the remedies proposed for illnesses in the second edition appear improbable now, including this one suggested for curing tuberculosis:
With respect to eighteenth-century knowledge, however, the second edition comes across as far less old-fashioned. Much of "Chemistry" came from the works of Pierre-Joseph Macquer, a respected chemist.Doig et al., "James Tytler's Edition," 111. Biblical chronology was still widely endorsed in Europe in the late eighteenth century. And Solano's "remedy" for tuberculosis continued to be published in the medical literature into the early 1800s, including in The Edinburgh Practice of Medicine, Surgery, and Midwifery in 1803.The Edinburgh Practice of Medicine, Surgery, and Midwifery, new edition, vol. 2 (London: Kearsley, 1803), 184. More generally, the treatises "Materia Medica" and "Pharmacy" in the second edition were copied almost word for word from a recent edition of the New Dispensatory (1753), which grew out of the Edinburgh Pharmacopoeia, an official publication of the College of Physicians of Edinburgh.Doig et al., "James Tytler's Edition," 129.