guess. They numbered 7381 from the mother-country and her colonies,
and 6556 from the rest of the world. Certainly, a change this from the
first French exhibition, held in the dark days of the Directory, when
the list reached but 110 names. We shall dismiss the statistics of
this exhibition with the remark that it has precedence of its fellows
in financial success as well as in time, having cleared a hundred
and seventy-odd thousand pounds, and left the Kensington Museum as
a memorial of that creditable feat, besides sending its cast-off but
still serviceable induviæ to Sydenham, where it enshrines another
museum, chiefly of architectural reproductions in plaster, in a
sempiternal coruscation of fountains, fireworks and fiddle-bows. The
palace of industry has become the palace of the industrial--abundantly
useful still if it lure him from the palace of gin. The chrism of
Thackeray's inaugural ode will not have been dishonored.

[Illustration: CORK EXHIBITION BUILDING, 1853.]

The first of the great fairs, in so many respects a model to all
that came after, was beset at the outset by the same difficulty in
arrangement encountered by them. How to reconcile the two headings of
subjects and nations, groups of objects and groups of exhibitors, the
endowments and progress of different races and the advance of mankind
generally in the various fields of effort, was, and is, a problem only
approximately to be solved. It was yet more complicated in 1851 from
the compression of the entire display into one building of simple and
symmetrical form, instead of dispersing certain classes of objects,
bulky and requiring special appliances for their proper display, into
subsidiary structures--the plan so effectively employed in Fairmount
Park. A sort of compromise was arrived at which rendered possible the
mapping of both countries and subjects, especially in the reports, and