THE SATURDAY REVIEW OF LITERATURE

New York City, New York, U.S.A.

23 October 1926

(pages 229-231, 235-236)

The New Britannica

(Inside and Out)

By C. K. Ogden

Between the ages of ten and twenty-five the growing organism is prepared for the Battle with Death. So too with the Body of Knowledge. Between 1910 and 1925, it "just growed"—and after Topsy, the Autopsy. Its debonair grandsire the eighteenth, its heavy father the nineteenth, of a long line of centuries, were dissected and embalmed in those twelve monumental cenotaphs—the successive editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica as we have known it hitherto. But with the Resurrection at the sawn of the new century, a new Body was formed. Overshadowed in infancy, it grew slowly; but since 1910 its progress has been phenomenal, and now we can profitably take stock of the adolescent period, for the three new volumes of the Encyclopaedia are before us.

Once upon a time the writing of encyclopaedias was a glorious adventure, . . .

[ . . . ]

While it is indeed gratifying to have Dr. John B. Watson's crystallization of Behaviorism it is disappointing to find no mention of so profound and influential a thinker as Professor W. M. Wheeler, America's leading entomologist and perhaps her leading sociologist as well. Mr. Cornelius Newton Bliss and Mr. James Carrol Beckwith are dignified by full biographies, but Professors W. B. Cannon and C. Judson Herrick, who have contributed so brilliantly to our understanding of the body and mind of man receive no word of appreciation. Sir Richard Burbidge secures a handsome tribute, but Major Darwin's life-service to Eugenics evokes no echo. Charles Frohman is immortalized at length, but Mr. Orage's decade of intellectual pioneering on the New Age is greeted with silence, and even his journal draws a blank; the same applies to Henry Goddard Leach, while Herbert Croly is indexed as Croley. Dean Keppel is side-stepped no less than J. O'Hara Cosgrave, Thobez, Walkley, Hartley Withers, Bruce Richmond, and Norman Hapgood. Frank Harris suffers with them. Baron Corvo rings no bells, nor Panait Istrati, not the Poet Laureate's discovery of Gerald Hopkins. Even necrophily avails Aleister Crowley naught, though his claims as poet are at least equal to those of Edna St. Vincent Millay; and it is a pity that Rudolph Valentino lived and died in vain.

Why, if Douglas Fairbanks, . . .