solid masonry. Being of rolled iron, bolted together in segments, they
can, like the other constituents of the building, be taken apart and
erected elsewhere when the gentlemen of the commission, their good
work done and the century duly honored, shall fold their tents like
the Arabs, though not so silently.

A breadth of thirty feet will be left to the main promenades along and
athwart, of fifteen feet to the principal ones on either side, and of
ten feet to all the others. Narrow highways these for traversing the
kingdoms of the world, but, combined, they nearly equal the bottom
depth of the Suez Canal, very far exceed the five feet of the Panama
Railway, and still farther the camel-track that sufficed a few
centuries ago to link our ancestors to the Indies. The berths of
the nations run athwartship, or north and south as the great ark is
anchored. The classes of objects are separated by lines running in the
opposite direction. Noah may be supposed to have followed some such
arrangement in his storage of zoological zones and families. He had
the additional aid of decks; which our assemblers of the universe
decline, small balconies of observation being the only galleries of
the Main Building. Those at the different stages of the central towers
will be highly attractive to students who prefer the general to the
particular, or who, exhausted for the time, retire to clear their
brains from the dust of detail and muster their faculties for another
charge on the vast army of art. From this perch one may survey mankind
from China to Peru through "long-drawn aisles" flooded with mellow
light, the subdued tones of the small surface that glass leaves open
to the paint-brush relieved with a few touches of positive color to
destroy monotony. These are assisted by the colored glass louvres,
which have no other artistic merit, but serve, where they are placed
over the side-entrances, to indicate the nation to whose department