Paul's, high enough to accommodate comfortably one of her ancestral
elms, and capacious enough to sustain a general invitation to all
mankind to exhibit and admire.

Novelty and innovation attended the first step of the great movement.
The design of the structure made architects rub their eyes, and
yet its origin was humble and practical enough. The Adam of crystal
palaces, like him of Eden, was a gardener. When Joseph Paxton raised
the palm-house at Chatsworth he little suspected that he was building
for the world--that, to borrow a simile from his own vocation, he was
setting a bulb which would expand into a shape of as wide note as the
domes of Florence and St. Sophia. And the cost of his new production
was so absurdly low--eighty thousand pounds by the contract.
The cheapness of his plan was its great merit in the eyes of the
committee, and that which chiefly determined its selection over
two hundred and forty-four competitors. This new cathedral for the
apotheosis of industry resembled those of the old worship in the
attributes of nave, aisles and transepts; and these features have
been, by reason in great degree of the requirements of construction,
continued in its successors. Galleries were added to the original
design to secure space additional to what was naturally deemed at
first an ample allowance for all comers. Before ground had been well
broken the demands of British exhibitors alone ran up to four hundred
and seventeen thousand superficial feet instead of the two hundred and
ten thousand--half the whole area--allotted them. The United States
were offered forty thousand feet; France, fifty thousand, afterward
increased to sixty-five; the Zollverein, thirty thousand, and
India the same. A comparison of the whole number of exhibitors, as
distributed between Great Britain and other countries, indicates that
the equal division of the superficial space was a tolerably accurate