Nowe Ateny  Nowe Ateny "(New Athens)" is the abbreviated title of the first Polish-language encyclopedia, authored by the 18th century Polish priest Benedykt Joachim Chmielowski. The first edition was published in 1745–1746 in Lwów (Lviv); the second edition, updated and expanded, in 1754–1764. The first part of the full title was: New Athens or the Academy full of all science, divided into subjects and classes, for the wise ones to record, for the idiots to learn, for the politicians to practice, for the melancholics to entertain issued... The first edition of the encyclopedia contains 938 pages. It has a subject (not alphabetic) organization. Chmielowski compiled data from a few hundred references, dating from antiquity to his contemporary. Almost every sentence in the book is in-line referenced, frequently in Latin, a lingua franca in Poland among the educated classes as in most of Central and Western Europe of the 18th century. To the data from more than a hundred original authors, Chmielowski added personal annotations, for example, "Dragons existed for sure, I myself held, visiting Radziwills' castle, a rib of a dragon bigger than a regular sabre". Judging from the inclusion of numerous stories, anecdotes, and description of strange phenomena and exotic countries (like China, Japan), the encyclopedia was directed towards a rather popular audience and aimed to arouse readers' curiosity and desire for learning. The encyclopedia was the object of harsh critique in the Enlightenment period. It was given as an example of ignorance, stupidity and superstition, contrasting with the Enlightenment thought. "Nowe Ateny" is the source of a few memorable and amusing "definitions", often quoted in Poland to this day:  The humor was probably unintentional by the author. Rather, he did not see the benefit of defining the most common animals of the time and place for his intended audience. In modern Polish, the above definition of the horse is sometimes used as a colorful equivalent of the statement "the concept is more obvious than it appears to be from its more technical definition". However, since the few decades opinions about "Nowe Ateny" have changed for much positive. It has to be noticed, that quotations mentioned above were just a fragments taken from broad context - for example Chmielowski has written more than 15 pages about the horses in his monumental, 3000 pages long encyclopedia (four volumes).