Encyclopædia Britannica it is scarcely used, and reviewers have recommended that it be dropped from the encyclopaedia. The also has color transparencies of human anatomy and several appendices listing the staff members, advisors, and contributors to all three parts of the Britannica. Taken together, the and comprise roughly 40 million words and 24,000 images. The two-volume index has 2,350 pages, listing the 228,274 topics covered in the "Britannica", together with 474,675 subentries under those topics. The "Britannica" generally prefers British spelling over American; for example, it uses "colour" (not "color"), "centre" (not "center"), and "encyclopaedia" (not "encyclopedia"). However, there are exceptions to
Encyclopædia Britannica First Edition conceived of the "Britannica" as a conservative reaction to the French "Encyclopédie" of Denis Diderot (published 1751–1766), which was widely viewed as heretical. The "Encyclopédie" had begun as a French translation of the popular English encyclopedia, "Cyclopaedia" published by Ephraim Chambers in 1728. Although later editions of Chambers' "Cyclopaedia" were still popular, and despite the commercial failure of other English encyclopedias, Macfarquhar and Bell were inspired by the intellectual ferment of the Scottish Enlightenment and thought the time ripe for a new encyclopedia "compiled upon a new plan". Needing an editor, the two chose a 28-year-old scholar named William Smellie