The English physician and philosopher, Sir Thomas Browne used the word 'encyclopaedia' in 1646 in the preface to the reader to define his "Pseudodoxia Epidemica", a major work of the 17th-century scientific revolution. Browne structured his encyclopaedia upon the time-honoured scheme of the Renaissance, the so-called 'scale of creation' which ascends through the mineral, vegetable, animal, human, planetary, and cosmological worlds. "Pseudodoxia Epidemica" was a European best-seller, translated into French, Dutch, and German as well as Latin it went through no fewer than five editions, each revised and augmented, the last edition appearing in 1672.