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Encyclopedia Britannica

The Encyclopædia Britannica was born in 18th-century Edinburgh amid the great intellectual ferment known as the Scottish Enlightenment. It was there and then that Adam Smith prepared The Wealth of Nations, Sir Walter Scott wrote novels, Robert Burns poetry, David Hume and Adam Ferguson philosophy, and James Boswell grew to manhood and attended the university. According to one chronicler of Britannica history, Edinburgh in the mid-1700s was "a city on the verge of a golden age, a center of learning and a home of writers, thinkers, and philosophers, wags, wits, and teachers."
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