PREFACE

on which official history has thrown but little light. According to the authorized version of the story--as related, for example, in Lord Morley's work on the Encyclopædists--the plan of translating Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopædia, which had appeared in 1728, was suggested to Diderot "some fifteen years later" by a French bookseller named Le Breton. Diderot's "fertile and energetic intelligence transformed the scheme.... It was resolved to make Chambers's work a mere starting-point for a new enterprise of far wider scope." We then go on to read of the financial difficulties that now beset the publisher, of the embarrassment of Diderot, who "felt himself unequal to the task of arranging and supervising every department of a new book that was to include the whole circle of the sciences," of the