History of the Encyclopædia Britannica the criteria by which the articles were sorted were not obvious even to scholars, despite Dr. Adler's claims that the sorting followed naturally from the "Propædia's" outline of all knowledge. In 1985, the "Britannica" responded to reader requests by restoring the index as a two-volume set. The number of topics indexed by the "Britannica" has fluctuated from 500,000 (1985, the same as in 1954) to 400,000 (1989,1991) to 700,000 in the current 2007 print version. Presumably, this recent increase reflects the introduction of efficient electronic indexing, since the size of the encyclopedia has remained nearly constant at approximately 40 million
Chinese encyclopedia times the amount of material in the "Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition". Although most scholars consider the 222 CE "Huanglan" (see below) to be the first Chinese "leishu" encyclopedia. Needham, Lu, and Huang call the late 4th to early 2nd centuries BCE "Erya" the oldest Chinese encyclopedia, and consider its derivative literature (beginning with the "Fangyan" and "Huanglan") as the main line of descent for encyclopedias in China. The c. 239 BCE "Lüshi Chunqiu", which is an anthology of quotes from many Hundred Schools of Thought philosophical texts, is another text sometimes characterized as the first Chinese "encyclopedia". Although its content