Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 17, No. 102, June, 1876. VariousЧитать онлайн книгу.
to be still more marked. In Agricultural Hall the United States claim less than two-thirds. The unexpected interest taken in this branch by foreigners will enhance its prominence and value among the attractions of the exposition. The collection of tropical products for food and manufacturing is very complete. The development of the equatorial regions of the globe has barely commenced. Even our acquaintance with their natural resources remains but superficial. The country which takes the lead in utilizing them in its trade and manufactures will gain a great advantage over its fellows. England's commercial supremacy never rested more largely on that foundation than now. Brazil, the great power of South—as the Union is of North—America, possesses nearly half of the accessible virgin territory of the tropics. Our interest joins hers in retaining this vast endowment as far as possible for the benefit of the Western World. A perception of this fact is shown in the exceptional efforts made by Brazil to be fully represented in all departments of the exposition, and in the visit to it of her chief magistrate, as we may properly term her emperor, the only embodiment of hereditary power and the monarchical principle in a country that enjoys—and has for the half century since its erection into an independent state maintained—free institutions.
In art domestic exhibits utterly lose their preponderance. Our artists content themselves with a small fraction of the wall- and floor-space in Memorial Hall and its northern annex. In extent of both "hanging" and standing ground they but equal England and France, each occupying something over twenty thousand square feet. Italy in the æsthetic combat selects the chisel as her weapon, and takes the floor with a superb array of marble eloquence, some three hundred pieces of statuary being contributed by her sculptors. She might in addition set up a colorable claim to the works executed on her soil or under the teaching of her schools by artists of other nativities, and thus make, for example, a sweeping raid into American territory. But she generously leaves to that division the spoils swept from her coasts by the U.S. ship Franklin, together with the works bearing her imprint in other sections, satisfied with the wealth undoubtedly her own, itself but a faint adumbration of the vast hoard she retains at home. Italy does not view the occasion from a fine-art standpoint alone. Of her nine hundred and twenty-six exhibitors, only one-sixth are in this department.
JAPANESE CARPENTERS.
Nor, on the art side of our own country, must we overlook the Historical division, the perfecting of which has been a labor of love with Mr. Etting. He allots space among the old Thirteen, and reserves a place at the feast of reunion to the mother of that rebellious sisterhood.
Forty acres of "floor-space" sub Jove remained to be awarded to foreign and domestic claimants. Gardening is one of the fine arts. Certainly nothing in Memorial Hall can excel its productions in richness, variety and harmony of color and form. Flower, leaf and tree are the models of the palette and the crayon. Their marvelous improvement in variety and splendor is one of the most striking triumphs of human ingenuity. A few hundred species have been expanded into many thousand forms, each finer than the parent. It is a new flora created by civilization, undreamed of by the savage, and voluminous in proportion to the mental advancement of the races among whom it has sprung up. Progress writes its record in flowers, and scrawls the autographs of the nations all over Lansdowne hill. No need of gilded show-cases to set off the German and Germantown roses, the thirty thousand hyacinths in another compartment, or the plot of seven hundred and fifty kinds of trees and shrubs planted by a single American contributor. The Moorish Kiosque, however, comes in well. The material is genuine Morocco, the building having been brought over in pieces from the realm of the Saracens, of "gul in its bloom" and of "Larry O'Rourke"—as Rogers punned down the poem of his Irish friend.
The nations comfortably installed, we must sketch the tactical system under which they are drawn up for peaceful contest. The classification of subjects adopted by the Commission embraces seven departments. Of these, the Main Building is devoted to I. Mining and Metallurgy; II. Manufactures; III. Education and Science; Memorial Hall and its appendages, to IV. Art; Machinery Hall, to V. Machinery; Agricultural Hall, to VI. Agriculture; and Horticultural Hall and its parterres, to VII. Horticulture. These habitats have, as we have heretofore seen, proved too contracted for the august and expansive inmates assigned them. All of the latter have overflowed; mining, for instance, into the mineral annex of thirty-two thousand square feet and the great pavilion (a hundred and thirty-five feet square) of Colorado and Kansas; education into the Swedish and Pennsylvania school-houses and others already noted; manufactures into breweries, glass-houses, etc.; and so on with an infinity of irrepressible outgrowths.
FAÇADE OF THE DIVISION OF THE NETHERLANDS, MAIN BUILDING.
Department I. is subdivided into classes numbered from 100 to 129, and embracing the products of mines and the means of extracting and reducing them. II. extends from Class 200 to Class 296—chemical manufactures, ceramics, furniture, woven goods of all kinds, jewelry, paper, stationery, weapons, medical appliances, hardware, vehicles and their accessories. III. deals with the high province of educational systems, methods and libraries; institutions and organizations; scientific and philosophical instruments and methods; engineering, architecture in its technical and non-æsthetic aspect, maps; physical, moral and social condition of man. Fifty classes, 300 to 349 inclusive, fence in this field of pure reason. Department IV., Classes 400-459, covers sculpture, painting, photography, engraving and lithography, industrial and architectural designs, ceramic decorations, mosaics, etc. V., Classes 509-599, takes charge of machines and tools for mining, chemistry, weaving, sewing, printing, working metal, wood and stone; motors; hydraulic and pneumatic apparatus; railway stock or "plant;" machinery for preparing agricultural products; "aërial, pneumatic and water transportation," and "machinery and apparatus especially adapted to the requirements of the exhibition." VI., Classes 600-699, assembles arboriculture and forest products, pomology, agricultural products, land and marine animals, pisciculture and its apparatus, "animal and vegetable products," textile substances, machines, implements and products of manufacture, agricultural engineering and administration, tillage and general management. Under Department VII., Classes 700-739, come ornamental trees, shrubs and flowers, hothouses and conservatories, garden tools and contrivances, garden designing, construction and management.
The accumulated experience of past expositions, seconded by the judgment and systematic thoroughness apparent in the preparations for the present one, makes this a good "working" classification. It has done away with confusion to an extent hardly to have been hoped for, and all the thousands of objects and subjects have dropped into their places in the exhibition with the precision of machinery, little adapted as some of them are to such treatment. Very impalpable and elusive things had to submit themselves to inspection and analysis, and have their elements tabulated like a tax bill or a grocery account. All human concerns were called on to be listed on the muster-roll and stand shoulder to shoulder on the drill-ground. Some curious comrades appear side by side in the long line. For example, we read: Class 286, brushes; 295, sleighs; 300, elementary instruction; 301, academies and high schools, colleges and universities; 305, libraries, history, etc.; 306, school-books, general and miscellaneous literature, encyclopædias, newspapers; 311, learned and scientific associations, artistic, biological, zoological and medical schools, astronomical observatories; 313, music and the drama. Then we find, closely sandwiched between, 335—topographical maps, etc.—and 400—figures in stone, metal, clay or plaster—340, physical development and condition (of the young of the genus Homo); 345, government and law; 346, benevolence, beginning with hospitals of all kinds and ending with—in the order we give them—emigrant-aid societies, treatment of aborigines and prevention of cruelty to animals! In the last-named subdivision the visitor will be stared out of countenance by Mr. Bergh's tremendous exposure of "various instruments used by persons in breaking the law relative to cruelty to animals," the glittering banner of the S.P.C.A., and its big trophy, eight yards square, that illuminates the east end of the north avenue of the Main Building, in opposition to the trophy at the other end of the same avenue illustrating the history of the American flag. But he will look in vain for selected specimens of the emigrant-runner, the luxuries of the steerage and Castle Garden, or for photographs of the well-fed post-trader and Indian agent, agricultural