What is an encyclopaedic dictionary: a dictionary, an encyclopaedia, or a dictionary with encyclopaedic entries (as medical dictionaries archetypically are)?Footnote ¹ Are they dictionaries of things or of lexical items and definitions, a distinction all the more urgent in medical compilations? Accounts setting out the approaches adopted in such works of reference are rare, and the historian of dictionaries is normally obliged to trawl the evidence of the dictionary itself, including its forematter, to establish how and on what principles it was constructed. In English, we generally search in vain for extensive accounts such as found in the entries for encyclopaedia, dictionary, and definition by the encyclopaedist Denis Diderot (see Diderot n.d.). Further difficulties are caused by the fact that what we now call an encyclopaedia was frequently entitled a ‘universal dictionary’ in the eighteenth century. The distinction was clearly blurred.

It is therefore refreshing – and illuminating not only to philologists but also to historians of science – to find extended comments on such works of reference, albeit not penned by mainstream lexicographers and encyclopaedists. This chapter examines comments by three disparate eighteenth-century compilers of such volumes on their nature and function. The hugely successful Cyclopaedia by Ephraim Chambers (1680?–1740) appeared in 1728. His insights were subsequently applied to the medical dictionary by Robert James (1703–1776), published 1742–1745, and are also relevant to the dictionaries published or projected by James Keir (1735–1820), who translated one dictionary of chemistry (a subject critical to medicine), and later undertook an abortive one of his own, published in part in 1789.

Diderot’s entry for encyclopaedia argues that compiling one would require so much time and effort that it would be desperately out of date once published. Words are coined, become obsolete, and change meaning, sometimes quite abruptly. Definitions can be rendered inaccurate and misleading. Diderot also maintains that insightful cross-referencing ‘will give an encyclopedia the character which a good dictionary ought to possess […] of changing the common mode of thinking’. ‘An encyclopedia’, he argues, ‘is a rapid and disinterested exposition of the discoveries of men in all places, all kinds, and all centuries’ (Diderot n.d.: s.v. encyclopedia).Footnote ² Such a work, according to Diderot, provides general and permanent instruction. Thus the ‘dictionarist’ or encyclopaedist imposes systems of thought on the reader that may enhance and expand knowledge as well as disseminate it.

8.1 Ephraim Chambers on Dictionaries

Ephraim Chambers, born near Kendal, was apprenticed to a London cartographer and conceived the idea of compiling a compendium of knowledge, inspired by John Harris’s Lexicon Technicum (1704) and the work of Pierre Bayle and Louis Moreri. First published in 1728, his Cyclopaedia ran through three editions before his death.Footnote ³ Chambers defines a dictionary as ‘a Collection of Definitions of the Words of a Language’ (1728 Preface: xxi), a definition that draws attention to the meanings ascribed to the word list but not to its constituents.Footnote ⁴ Within this broader category he identifies three kinds of dictionary: grammatical, philosophical and technical (that is, lexical, scientific and those of ‘arts and sciences’), the latter incorporating medicine, seen as both art and science. Nevertheless, in the Cyclopaedia text Chambers offers ‘a Collection, or Catalogue of all the Words of a Language, or an Art, with their Significations; rang’d in Order of Alphabet’, now stressing the list of lemmas rather than their ‘significations’. He argues that the lexicographer

Thus the dictionarist is to achieve parity among discrete items of knowledge by reducing the individual entries to equivalence, a characteristic of Chambers’s work that Diderot disparaged, writing of Chambers’s perfect and regular encyclopaedic order that:

But Chambers also understood that he was not merely to record, but to analyse and interpret. He was well aware of the limitations of such a classification, and thus of the nuances of the dictionary as a genre:

More generally, Chambers claims, lexicographers had been insufficiently discriminating. Latin–English–Latin dictionaries and Vernacular–English–Vernacular dictionaries, despite greater sophistication, remained largely tied to educational ends in terms of both achievement and marketing. Medical dictionaries repeatedly addressed the medical tyro. For Chambers, principles that remained largely undeclared and unconsidered drove lexicography, and articulating them would help to purge dictionaries of their disorderliness and lexical excesses.

With hindsight, Chambers could hardly have made such an argument without the development of the lexical dictionary (see Lancashire Reference Lancashire, Brockmeier, Wang and Olson2002), rather than dictionaries of translation equivalents and/or glosses. However, it is significant that he also expressed this emerging view, albeit succinctly. The dictionary for Chambers is also a historical artefact that provides post hoc explanations for what is already known; his vision of the role of the dictionary is thus far more constrained than Diderot’s:

A medical dictionary might thus have to painstakingly incorporate new words for innovative concepts and procedures with full explanations, whereas relisting old ones was relatively straightforward.

For Chambers, the lexicographer’s role is qualitatively different from that of the encyclopaedist. What the encyclopaedist undertakes is ‘An Attempt towards a Survey of the Republick of Learning […] the Boundary that circumscribes our present Prospect; and separates the known, from the unknown Parts of the Intelligible World’ (1728 Dedication) as contemporaneously understood, a boundary that, despite his expressed limitations, Chambers sees as being pushed far back into the unknown ‘other Hemisphere’ (1728 Dedication) under the King’s patronage, leading to new discoveries and as yet unimagined inventions. A vision fit for a king to be sure, but Chambers is less clear on how exactly the Cyclopaedia will conduce to this progress.

The dictionary retains a valuable role, however: ‘It may even be said, that if the System be an Improvement upon the Dictionary; the Dictionary is some Advantage to the System; and […] perhaps, the only Way, wherein the whole circle or body of knowledge can be delivered’ (1728 Preface: i). He sees a system as the web or chain of logical deductions and conclusions that constitute a science (1728 Preface: ix). Chambers argues that all the minutiae must be ‘swallowed up in the Whole’ (1728 Preface: i), rather than being allowed to dominate the whole as a purely alphabetical arrangement would surely demand. Each minor point should assist the reader’s imagination to envisage the whole, and vice versa. Thus the use of both systems and alphabetisation offers advantages.

Chambers’s preface opens nonetheless by comparing his present effort with the monumental labour that produced the dictionaries of the Italian Accademia della Crusca and the French Academy, rather than encyclopaedic works. He also recognises the inheritance these and other works bequeathed him – so much indeed that digesting and organising it into ‘one consistent Whole’ (1728 Preface: i) has been his greatest problem. Chambers undertook to impose order and coherence on the multifarious materials obtained from previous dictionaries, his purpose being ‘as different from theirs, as a System from a Cento’ (1728 Preface: i). Cento, a word with a somewhat negative connotation, means a patchwork, something composed of scraps, a work composed of quotations. It is thus disorganised in terms of the items comprising its internal content, just as a dictionary is distinct in this sense from a thesaurus. Chambers does not consider the dictionary cento as diametrically opposed to the encyclopaedic system, however, but merely as representing a deficiency. His forward-looking view suggests that he envisioned a cline rather than an unambiguous divide between the genres:

Chambers’s method is to rank data on a given subject along a line of inference and logical subordination and dependence, like links in a chain. Further, he explores the interrelations between subjects, intending to set out the whole of knowledge for the reader, which ‘appears indeed with the Face of a Wilderness; but ‘tis a Wilderness thro’ which the Reader may pursue his Journey as securely, tho not so expeditiously and easily, as thro’ a regular Parterre’ (1728 Preface: i).Footnote ⁶ His multifarious sources, as Kennedy relates at length, demand this level of curation (Kennedy Reference Kennedy2016: 14–21, 36–45).

Chambers is also very aware of polysemy, and that monosemous lexemes are rare, as well as acknowledging complex ideas and collocations, so that, for instance, the very polysemous entry for composition includes the pharmaceutical sense. A medical and surgical sense appears under friction, and the ‘Frixion of Medicines’ is also noted separately. The clearly medical term fistula is also noted as a pipe through which early communicants sucked wine, and hermetical (1728: s.v. hermetic) notes causes in medicine and how medicines work. Chambers claims that the mind will ‘bundle up its Ideas, and thus pay or receive ’em in Parcels, [leaving] us very few simple ones […] Names which denote only one Idea’ (1728: xviii).

Chambers offers several definitions of a term, one being ‘a Word which denotes an Assemblage, or System of Ideas, relating to some one Point, which the Mind artfully complicates, or associates together, for the conveniency of its own Operations’ (1728 Preface: xix).Footnote ⁷ Terms allow readers to assimilate, contextualise, and communicate knowledge more easily. Chambers is also very aware of what he omits, such as the detailed properties of material substances, derived forms, ‘plebeian words’, and so on (see 1728 Preface: xxiv–xxv).

Words may also become seriously misleading with scientific advances and discoveries. Chambers cites attraction, not a completely new term, but one used by Newton in a new way:

In short, trying to redefine a word as a term has the practical effect of causing confusion and retarding progress.

Further, Chambers’s hesitation about the use of an encyclopaedic dictionary in advancing knowledge was unjustified. Dictionaries were of genuine use to more than simply casual or inquisitive users, as was to be demonstrated later by James Keir in introducing his chemical dictionary, which he had not merely translated but also added to. The eminent ‘Mr. Macquer […] acknowledged that my [Keir’s] notes to the translation of his Dictionary first excited his attention to the discoveries which had been made in England on the elastic fluids’ (Keir 1789 Preface: iv).

8.2 Robert James

Robert James was from a well-to-do Staffordshire family. He attended St John’s College, Oxford, and received a mandamus MD from Cambridge in 1728. He became an extra-licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians in the same year, and is best known for Dr James’s Fever Powder, a hugely popular antimonial nostrum patented in 1747, which sold well into the twentieth century.Footnote ⁸

James’s A Medicinal Dictionary, a massive folio work with about 14,000 entries, is far more both encyclopaedic and lexical as well as glossarial than its contemporary rivals. It silently adopts Chambers’s notion of the system within a dictionary structure, but fails to exploit its advantages, since large entries are exhaustive, not selective, and are sandwiched between innumerable minor entries of marginal relevance. Multipage entries are commonplace, anatome (anatomy), for example, taking up forty-three pages. As with contemporaneous medical dictionaries, headwords are characteristically in Latin or Greek, forms that do not appear in the text itself. Thus air, though mentioned often in the text, appears under AER, which is absent, bar cross-references. What James aims for, however, is exhaustiveness, not a system, which would involve disciplined curation.

Other than disambiguation of older terminology, James’s Proposals (Reference James1741) pays no attention to the linguistic and lexicographical issues prominent in Chambers and (as we shall see) Keir. He does promise alphabetical order, as well as methods of cure in the post-lemmatic material, treatises on anatomy, surgery, and aliments (1741: [1]), restoration of order to the ‘perplexity’ of the terminology of the materia medica (1741: [1]), and select cases to illustrate particular diseases and treatments. The surgical treatise will contain an alphabetical list of ‘subordinate articles’ to assist the reader with ‘a distinct View of the whole Science’ (1741: [2]). He also stresses veterinary medicine as a ‘System of Comparative Physic and the lives of famous physicians’, but is inconsistent, also suggesting that physicians should not waste their time on theory and systems (1741: [2]).

Turning to the dictionary itself, long and short entries constitute extremes, the disparity being beyond systematic. Many short entries with only a single signification, no definition, or even a medical sense occur often. Robert James’s professional readers would already know much of the neoclassical terminology in his Medicinal dictionary (1743–1745), which may explain his frequent neglect of definitions.

To illustrate, ptissana (decorticated barley) has a solid, single-column entry. The next long one is pulmo, but between these are twenty-one short entries, only one of which, pulegium (pennyroyal), has much substance. Simple glosses with no medical relevance (‘PULEX. A flea’) abound, and some are merely cross-references (‘PUBES. See Abdomen’). The series alae to alaqueca mentions many entries for stones, only some of which have medical uses. To take a further series, amurca, the dregs of pressed olive oil, is actually entered twice, giving every appearance that these entries were prepared independently and then entered without the duplication being noticed. These are followed by the short entry for amyche (superficial laceration of the skin);Footnote ⁹ amydros, a Hippocratic word meaning barely visible; amygdalæ (almonds, tonsils); amygdalia (also almonds), given another Hippocratic reference; amygdalatum, almond milk; amygdaloides (a species of spurge, euphorbia), for which a number of synonymous cross-references are offered; then amygdalopersicum, the almond peach. The medical significance of these varies greatly from obvious (amyche) to less obvious but perhaps useful as an ingredient (amurca) to none at all (amygdalopersicum) to unstated and apparently entered only because they are Hippocratic.Footnote ¹⁰ James’s use of large-scale terms and entries to incorporate information into a ‘system’ is inconsistent, however, since under febris (fever), we find simply a cross-reference to a treatment (cathartica), some fever types (depuratoria, miliaris), and a main article (pyretos). James’s own use of system is largely confined to ‘the nervous system’. Many entries simply provide a Greek term, as in ‘PROSCOLLEMA, ϖροσχολλεμα. An Agglutination’. Agglutinatio is defined under its own headword. As with earlier English dictionaries, Erasmus’s encomiums on copiousness seem still to dominate (Erasmus Reference Erasmus1512). James’s dictionary in this respect could be seen as allowing the minutiae to swallow the systems whole.

Chambers had sought ‘extracts and accounts from books of all kinds’ as sources and to create a coherent system out of ‘a confused Heap of incongruous Parts’ (1728 Preface: i). He offers anatomy as an example, considered not simply within itself, but also in relation to medicine generally. He starts with a definition and a guide to the related terminology and concludes with a brief history and survey of anatomical writers. By contrast, James begins with a one-word gloss and an extended historical and practical argument for the use and necessity of anatomy. The history of anatomy comes much later. Chambers thus offers a series of fingerposts; James a disquisition beginning with the circulation of the blood, the skin, liver, and so on. James sought to be all-inclusive, not to curate systems, stressing inclusiveness repeatedly in his proposals: ‘every particular Muscle […] all the Glands […] nothing shall be willingly omitted […] everything to which a Name has been assigned […] all the minute Inquiries of the Microscope’, and so on. He also saw his dictionary as ‘medicinal’, not philosophical (‘scientific’), and did not want physicians ‘mis-spending their most improveable Days in reading Compilers of Theories and Systems’ (James 1741: [1]). James does not list system at all, merely offering systema, the sediment at the bottom of the urinal. His full copiousness remained unrealised, as several of his later publications were medical translations intended for his library-replacing dictionary, but cut by the anxious publisher. ‘The following Sheets were intended for the Medicinal Dictionary,’ James complained, but ‘the Impatience of the Bookseller […] oblig’d me to omit it’ (Hoffmann and Ramazzini Reference Hoffman and Ramazzini1746: ix).

8.3 James Keir

James Keir originally went to Edinburgh to study medicine in 1754 (King-Hele Reference King-Hele1977: 32), where he became a life-long friend of Erasmus Darwin, and later moved to Birmingham.Footnote ¹¹ His training in the foremost British medical school would have piqued his interest in the two-century tradition of iatrochemistry stemming from Paracelsus and van Helmont. He became a member of the Lunar Society of Birmingham, and worked mainly as an industrialist, including ventures in glassworks and the manufacture of alkali and soap.

While several English medical dictionaries appeared up to 1800,Footnote ¹² chemical dictionaries, such as William Johnson’s Lexicon chymicum of 1652, were infrequent. A close relation between medicine and chemistry subsisted during this period, Keir contributing two such works in later eighteenth-century England.Footnote ¹³

Keir’s lexicographical activities included a translation of the Dictionnaire de chymie by Pierre-Joseph Macquer (1718–1784), and his own incomplete dictionary of chemistry. Macquer’s successful dictionary was published in French in 1766, and Keir was already working on it by 1769 (Schofield Reference Schofield1963: 79 n.).

Macquer’s original preface (Macquer 1766) advances Chambers’s argument that alphabetisation would be disadvantageous, since the parts of chemistry are interrelated. This was resolved somewhat by many of his entries being extensive essays about the headword; again, an encyclopaedic dictionary.

Keir’s additional notes enhanced the translation considerably.Footnote ¹⁴ Commenting on air, Keir notes that Macquer is apparently unaware of recent findings, including those ‘of Dr. Black, from experiments so conducted and related, that his treatise may be considered [showing] the best method of investigating and demonstrating chemical truths’ (Macquer 1771: 33).Footnote ¹⁵

Keir issued his second edition in 1777. In prefacing his 1789 dictionary, Keir explains that additions to Macquer’s work would improve it, specifying ‘the valuable discoveries that had been made […] by Dr. Black and Mr. Cavendish, on fixed and inflammable airs; a knowledge of which had not then reached Mr. Macquer’.Footnote ¹⁶ His work was thus positively received – ‘more consideration than is due to a mere translation’ (Keir Reference Keir1789 Preface: i).

Keir’s forematter to Macquer sets out some of his basic principles, which credit the reader’s knowledge and intelligence. He argues for the dictionary arrangement, mentioned in both the translator’s preface and the advertisement. Keir argues that chemistry is insufficiently systematic to be considered an independent discipline: ‘But the Chemistry […] now known is scarcely entitled to the name of science, so defined. It is at present little more than a collection of facts […] [and] incapable of a more systematical arrangement’ (Macquer Reference Macquer1771: ii).Footnote ¹⁷ In short, a cento. While chemistry does have systematic elements, Keir fears that a systematising work would omit other less connected or unconnected components. Alphabetisation thus implies completeness but undermines interrelations. The advertisement claims that:

Another advantage of alphabetical order is that if all the potential elements of chemistry are there, the reader can decide objectively and independently about internal coherences, and not admit preconceived notions.

Keir also claims that this ‘is not a mere vocabulary, or dictionary of definitions; but rather a number of dissertations, generally full and extensive’ (Macquer 1771 Advertisement), thus stressing its encyclopaedic nature. It seems clear that Keir ideally wants an internally coherent, systematised encyclopaedic work like that Chambers anticipated, rather than a dictionary, and, while preferring to minimise the essential dictionary functions, cannot see how to achieve this.Footnote ¹⁸ A little of this preface is retained verbatim in the introduction to his abortive later dictionary, as well as some of these arguments. Keir also added supplementary material and notes of his own, and promised to publish supplements as necessary.Footnote ¹⁹ Finally, it is curious that Keir omitted Macquer’s long and insightful preface, especially when translating the original author’s preface was a common practice. He does however cite it in his own, as well as mentioning Macquer’s attempt to overcome the disjointed nature of the subject by providing generous cross-referencing.

In the preface to the second edition, he explains that recent progress superseded his original article on fixable air. As a result, he added an appendix entitled A Treatise on the various kinds of permanently elastic fluids, or gases, clearly intended as a report on current research and knowledge. Unusually, Keir indicates his sources very precisely, using letter symbols to distinguish between a borrowing from Macquer, one from Leonhardi’s German translation of this work, and his own additions. Keir also explains this brings Macquer up to date, even though the translations into German and Italian had done this to some extent (Macquer Reference Macquer1777 Preface: i).

Keir later returned to lexicography, publishing The first part of a dictionary of chemistry (1789), mentioned by Erasmus Darwin to Richard Edgeworth on 20 February 1788: ‘And He is now printing a new improved edition of his chemical dictionary.’ Darwin also comments puckishly that ‘Keir makes soap and dictionaries […] and thrives I dare say’ (King-Hele Reference King-Hele1977: 179). Keir was probably more seriously engaged, however, since he had anticipated in his first preface that ‘some person of eminently perspicuous genius may unfold the laws and causes of chemical analysis, collect and methodize the scattered facts, and form the several parts of Chemistry into one regular, connected science’ (Macquer Reference Macquer1771: iii). Keir was presumably now taking his first halting steps in that direction, and adding greatly to what had appeared previously. Keir employs Chambers’s distinction between dictionaries and encyclopaedias and between systematic structure and alphabetical order: that encyclopaedias enjoin systematic thought on the reader, but dictionaries allow freer judgement (1789 Preface: iii).Footnote ²⁰

In the event, Keir’s own dictionary only reached its first part (A–Acid), apparently because of devastating theoretical and terminological problems, and despite much more being intended.Footnote ²¹ King-Hele attributes this to Keir’s recognition that he was wrong in clinging to the phlogiston theory, a seemingly reasonable supposition (King-Hele Reference King-Hele1977: 182, 192). Keir found himself awkwardly placed at a crucial time in chemistry as the ground-breaking discoveries during the 1780s were becoming known, especially that of oxygen. This meant that Keir, a committed phlogistian,Footnote ²² seems to have found accepting the new nomenclature for these phenomena demanded by the French chemists overwhelming. The immediate problem seems to have been air, part of the meaning of which was to be overtaken by the term gas for its various constituents, air being still understood as the irreducible element air when Keir was working on his dictionaries. Keir would have had to accept terms like oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and so on without seeing sufficient evidence that these were other than variant kinds of air.

Keir was at pains to position himself theoretically, specifically rejecting the ‘antiphlogistic’ terminology, since it ‘cannot be considered as the general language of Chemistry’ (1789 Preface: ii). Keir says much on phlogiston later in his preface (esp. vi–ix), but his friend Darwin joined the winning side by accepting the French innovations. It seems that part of Keir’s objection is that antiphlogistic theory required an entirely new nomenclature for chemistry and that his scepticism prevented accepting this. His complex view on terminology may well have arisen from profound doubts about his own theoretical position. By the early nineteenth century, Morveau’s and Lavoisier’s nomenclature had been largely accepted.Footnote ²³ Far more was at stake, however, than simply new terms replacing equivalent older ones – a paradigm shift from the Aristotelian notion of air as a single primary element to understanding the gaseous state as a fundamental condition of matter. When Joseph Black discovered carbon dioxide, he called it merely ‘fixed air’ (Black 1756: 199). Air had been regarded as containing impurities rather than as a mixture of gaseous elements (Crosland Reference Crosland, Holmes and Levere2000: 86–8).

Keir makes several insightful remarks about language, especially that of science, which show his sensitivity to the issue of how facts and theories relate, as well as the words and terminologies that describe them. There are two jobs, the first being to purge chemical terminology of the inappropriate and misleading detritus of the past, while the second is to accommodate the new terms. The first is relatively straightforward, but the second presents considerable difficulties. Keir takes a conservative but even-handed view of the new terminology:

This new theory was jumping the gun for Keir. His sensitivity to this issue seems to have left him too undecided to continue with what could have been a major scientific dictionary. He adumbrates two sources of imprecision and variability in language. These are the vagaries of its users and the attempts by chemists and their predecessors to reform it:

Keir wants a chemical terminology based on clear and unambiguous reference to the realia of the subject, stripped of the fanciful and obfuscatory as well as terms with no basis in anything other than theory. The essential problem was that Lavoisier and the French chemists, bar Macquer, by inventing an entirely new terminology, had anticipated and interdicted the English adherents of the phlogiston theory. Different words (dephlogisticated air, phlogisticated air, etc.) represented different and incompatible conceptual structures (Brock Reference Brock, Rivers and Wykes2008: 73–4).

Keir also used their public acceptance and demonstrable usefulness to defend dictionaries of sciences. He quotes his earlier translation of Macquer in asserting that because the discipline of chemistry is not yet inherently coherent, that is, ‘not yet capable either of the synthetic or analytic modes of explanation’ (Macquer 1771: ii), that an alphabetical arrangement has its advantages (as Ephraim Chambers, indeed, saw in acknowledging and reproducing such a coherence within his Cyclopædia). Reference is rendered easier than in a work that attempts to systematise the subject, and adherence to one theory rather than another is rendered unnecessary.

Change outran Keir’s evolutionary approach, however, despite his eminently sensible understanding of how languages change: ‘But as language is the common property of all, no authority is equal to any other alteration, however well imagined, but what is effected gradually, and […] by universal consent’ (Keir Reference Keir1789: xiv). He goes on to claim that the effort to change chemical terminology by the French chemists is very difficult – admirable, but doomed.

According to Keir, the proponents of the new French nomenclature

Keir fears that this certainty has not yet been achieved, much as he seems to approve. He is still wedded to phlogiston and, while not rejecting the antiphlogistic position out of hand, remains sceptical of its truth and general acceptability. In this genre, the system and consensus on it must prevail:

He goes on to discuss oxide, combustion, potash, and other terms. Accepting a word entails general acceptance, as well as a corresponding acceptance that the theory and the facts agree. Competing nomenclatures would only lead to confusion (Keir Reference Keir1789: xvi).

The subtlety of Keir’s discussion shows us the insufficiency of simple generalisations on lexical change. The familiar notion that as new discoveries were made the terminology moved in lockstep with it belies the complexity of the relationship between the words and the system of words and the world of things, and the profound doubt that motivated Keir. This raises a fundamental research problem. Failure to understand the nature of the process of change and how to approach it is an obstacle in itself. The still common notion that naming moves in lockstep with discovery and classification is overly simple. Such a post hoc view obscures the process of making the terminological transitions that Keir saw so clearly. The difficulty with contenting oneself with this oversimplification is that the process of achieving the transition and adjustment is much more interesting and revealing than describing its outcome, and helps to obscure what really needs to be investigated. Likewise, the ultimate success of a chemical experiment for Lavoisier depended primarily on the conceptual language and terminology by which it was conceived, not on its observable outcome, as Anderson points out (1984: 95–8).

As it happened, Keir was quickly superseded in this respect by A dictionary of chemistry (1795) by William Nicholson (1753–1815), a work that accepted the new French theories and terminology.Footnote ²⁷

Keir felt the lexicographical dilemma very strongly. Puerperal fever, as conceived in the eighteenth century, provides a case in point. The various names for this condition – childbed fever, milk fever, sepsis puerperalis, postpartum metritis—are based on theories about its cause, including cold, inflammation, putrefaction, nervous spasms, and so on. The way a disease is conceived crucially determines how research is conducted and progress made. Thomas Trotter, discussing the role of names and definitions in medical research in his Medicine Nautica (1797–1803), wrote insightfully that:

The disjunction between Keir’s theory and what he thought should go into the dictionary was noted by Moilliet in 1868:

Perhaps we should conclude by citing Erasmus Darwin’s terse remark of 12 September 1789 on reading Keir’s introduction about this infant system: ‘You have successfully combated the new nomenclature, and strangled him in the cradle before he has learnt to speak’ (cited in Moilliet Reference Moilliet1868: 96).

8.4 Conclusion

The compilers of A new and complete dictionary of arts and sciences of 1754 invoke the instability of the scientific lexicon, arguing that authors capriciously coin ‘a multiplicity of names for the same object […] subject[ing] lexicographers to the cruel and almost endless task of explaining the various terms […] for one and the same thing’ (Society of Gentlemen 1754, I: iv), a matter that occupied James as well (James Reference James1741: [ii]). Their answer is essentially Diderot’s plan to cross-reference consistently, both to synonyms and to subjects and their subdivisions, in order to create systems. They thus see encyclopaedias as digesting and explaining the compass of human knowledge ‘in the form of dictionaries’ (s.v. cyclopaedia). Chambers’s preface ends optimistically in justifying the dictionary as a ‘farrago of arts’, the cento that forms part of the dictionary, especially for the potential of each datum to spawn new systems: ‘the least of ’em may possibly be the Foundation of a new System’ (1728 Preface: xxix), but James does not envision or embrace this opportunity.

Both Chambers’s and Keir’s expansive and insightful theoretical commentaries put James’s lack of a theoretical stance, despite the sheer ambition of his dictionary, into perspective. Although utilising a structure apparently like that of Chambers, James gives little thought to the more general principles, concentrating simply on the details of what should be included in his entries and the value of the work. His dictionary nevertheless sufficiently exemplified the enlightenment reference work to induce Diderot to have it translated and published by 1746–1748, but it seems so almost inadvertently, more for its mass than for its adherence to encyclopaedic principles. James has both bloated his systemic entries and overstuffed the dictionary with the intervening ones in the interests of comprehensiveness. Both Chambers and Keir are much more enlightening and ‘enlightened’, whereas James, far from being an ‘analyst’ pace Chambers, has produced a work of superogation, more cento than system. Keir, caught out by rapid paradigmatic change, found himself stranded, whereas Chambers coped by being fortunate enough to come in the wake of the Newtonian revolution.