ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA. Encyclopaedia; or, a dictionary of arts, sciences, and miscellaneous literature. Eight edition 1853-1860. 21 volumes.

Eighth edition. Adam & Charles Black 1853-1860. Förlagets halvfranska band, komplett.

The 8th edition was published from 1853 to 1860, with title pages for each volume dated the year that volume was printed. It contained 21 numbered volumes, with 17,957 pages and 402 plates. The index, published in 1861, was 239 pages, and is bound together with volume I, the dissertations volume. Four of these dissertations were carried over from the 7th edition, and two were new to the 8th. The five included in volume 1 of the 8th (1853) were authored by Dugald Stewart, James Mackintosh, Richard Whately, John Playfair, and John Leslie, in that order, with the Whately work being a new one. A sixth dissertation, by J.D. Forbes, was issued in 1856, in a separate quarto volume, "gratis, along with Vol. XII".

The eighth edition, which appeared from 1852 to 1860, numbered 21 volumes, with an extra index volume of some 230 pages, and contained 17,957 pages and 402 plates. Napier had died, and the new editor was T.S. Traill (1781–1862), professor of medical jurisprudence at Edinburgh University. He was assisted by nine “regular staff of the Encyclopædia,” mentioned in the preface. The dissertations were retained, and Mackintosh’s dissertation on ethical philosophy had a clarifying preface by William Whewell. Two new dissertations were added: Stewart’s and Mackintosh’s were followed by one titled “Exhibiting a General View of the Rise, Progress, and Corruptions of Christianity” by Archbishop Richard Whately, and those by Playfair and Leslie were supplemented by a sixth dissertation by James David Forbes covering the mathematical and physical sciences up to 1850.

Although it retained articles from older editions, the eighth carried out the promise of its preface “that the revision…should be more thorough than had ever been attempted in any previous edition.” Not only were there many new entries on a variety of subjects, but the shorter unsigned articles were altered or completely rewritten much more often than formerly. The preface included a classified list of the chief treatises and their authors. The 11 headings were: “Theology and Ecclesiastical History,” “Philosophy Proper and Its History,” “Politics and Social Philosophy,” “Pure Mathematics,” “Natural Philosophy,” “Natural History,” “Philology and History,” “Biography,” “Geography and Topography,” “Fine Arts,” “Useful Arts.”

New subjects in the eighth edition included “Photography” by Sir David Brewster, “Ballot” and “Communism” by John Hill Burton, “Telegraph, Electric” by William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin), “Iron Bridges” by Robert Stephenson, “Crédit Mobilier” by Walter Bagehot, and “Ichthyology, Fossil,” covering Louis Agassiz’s system, by the editor. A.H. Layard contributed “Nineveh,” Isaac Pitman wrote “Stenography,” and “Hypatia” and “Iamblichus” were by Charles Kingsley, “Meteorology” by Sir John F.W. Herschel, and “Glacier” by James David Forbes. Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote without payment the biographies of Francis Atterbury, John Bunyan, Oliver Goldsmith, Samuel Johnson, and William Pitt. “Luther,” by the German diplomat and authority on church history Baron Christian Karl Josias von Bunsen, was described in the long article on its author in the ninth edition as “one of the finest biographies of the Reformer.” Among the four American contributors were Edward Everett, who wrote “George Washington,” and the historian Samuel Eliot, who wrote “United States of North America.”.