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The Encyclopaedia Metropolitana was published in London, from 1817 to 1845, quarto, 30 vols., and was issued in 59 parts (22,426 pages, 565 plates).

It professed to give sciences and systematic arts entire and in their natural sequence, as shown in the introductory treatise on method by the poet, critic and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose fundamental approach^[1] was to emphasize the relations of ideas, a mere alphabetization being held a comparatively trivial form of organization:

Method, therefore, becomes natural to the mind which has been accustomed to contemplate not things only, or for their own sake alone, but likewise and chiefly the relations of things, either their relations to each other, or to the observer, or to the state and apprehension of the hearers. To enumerate and analyze these relations, with the conditions under which alone they are discoverable, is to teach the science of method.

Later critics could say of the actual plan that, being the proposal of Coleridge, it had at least enough of a poetical character to be eminently unpractical (Quarterly Review, cxiii, 379); but the excellence of many of the treatises by Archbishop Richard Whately, Sir John Herschel, Professors Peter Barlow, George Peacock, Augustus de Morgan, etc., was undoubted.

It is in four divisions, the last only being alphabetical:

• I. Pure Sciences, 2 vols., 1,813 pages, 16 plates, 28 treatises, includes grammar, law and theology;
• II. Mixed and Applied Sciences, 6 vols., 5,391 pages, 437 plates, 42 treatises, including fine arts, useful arts, natural history and its application, the medical sciences;
• III. History and Biography, 5 vols., 4,458 pages, 7 maps, containing biography (135 essays) chronologically arranged (to Thomas Aquinas in vol. 3), and interspersed with (210) chapters on history (to 1815), as the most philosophical, interesting and natural form (but modern lives were so many that the plan broke down, and a division of biography, to be in 2vols., was announced but not published);
• IV. Miscellaneous and lexicographical, 13 vols., 10,338 pages, 105 plates, including geography, a dictionary of English and descriptive natural history.

The plates were issued in three volumes. An index volume, 364 pages, contained about 9,000 articles.

A re-issue in 38 vols. quarto, was announced in 1849. Of a second edition 42 vols. 8vo, 14,744 pages, belonging to divisions i. to iii., were published in 1849-1858.

References

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.