John Mills (encyclopedist)
John Mills (1717 – 1786 or 1796) was an encyclopedist on the Encyclopédie. He was originally a writer on agricultural matters from England. He proposed and worked on the Encyclopédie with Gottfried Sellius, a native of Gdańsk, who, after being a professor at Halle and Göttingen and residing in the Netherlands, had settled in Paris.
Mills and Sellius originally proposed simply to translate articles from Chambers' Cyclopaedia into French. However, Mills's knowledge of French was inadequate, the publisher André Le Breton was extremely dissatisfied with Mills's work, and Le Breton eventually physically assaulted Mills. Mills took Le Breton to court, but the court decided that Mills's incompetence had warranted the attack. Le Breton replaced Mills with Jean Paul de Gua de Malves, who in turn was later replaced by Denis Diderot.
Soon after the court ruling Mills left for England. In the 1760s he surfaced in London, where he became a well-known author on the subject of husbandry. In 1766 he became a member of the Royal Society.
Works
Translations
- Duhamel du Monceau: A Practical Treatise of Husbandry. J. Whiston and B. White, London 1759.
Author or Editor
- Of Commerce and Luxury
- An Essay on the Management of Bees. London 1766
- An Essay on the Weather. London 1770
- A New and Complete System of Practical Husbandry. London 1762-1765 (5 volumes)
- A Treatise on Cattle. 1776 (online copy at Google Books)
References
- John Lough: The Encyclopédie. Slatkine 1989, ISBN 978-2-05-101046-7, p. 9 (restricted online copy, p. 9, at Google Books)
- Spindler, Ulrike: 1. Die Encyclopédie von Diderot und d'Alembert. Aus: Madame de Pompadour - Die Encyclopédie, in: historicum.net, URL: http://www.historicum.net/no_cache/persistent/artikel/2917/ (retrieved 2010-3-31) (German)
External links
- The Encyclopédie - BBC Radio 4 broadcast (2010-10-26, 21:30)
|