resuscitation from its subterranean sleep of twenty centuries with its
minutest _tessera_ intact and every tint as fresh as the Phoenician
artist left it, suffer irreparable damage from a moment's carelessness
on the voyage to its temporary home in the New World. More solid things
of a very different character, and far less valuable pecuniarily, though
it may be quite as interesting to the promoter of human progress, exact
more or less time and attention to collect and prepare, and that will
not be bestowed upon them without some guarantee of their being safely
and inexpensively transmitted. So to simplify transportation as
practically to place the exposition buildings as nearly as possible at
the door of each exhibitor, student and sight-seer became, therefore, a
controlling problem.

In the solution of it there is no exaggeration in saying that the
Centennial stands more than a quarter of a century in advance of even
the latest of its fellow expositions. At Vienna a river with a few small
steamers below and a tow-path above represented water-carriage. Good
railways came in from every quarter of the compass, but none of them
brought the locomotive to the neighborhood of the grounds. In the matter
of tram-roads for passengers the Viennese distinguished themselves over
the Londoners and Parisians by the possession of _one_. In steam-roads
they had no advantage and no inferiority. At each and all of these
cities the packing-box and the passenger were both confronted by the
vexatious interval between the station and the exposition
building--often the most trying part of the trip. Horsepower was the one
time-honored resource, in '73 as in '51, and in unnumbered years before.
Under the ancient divisions of horse and foot the world and its
_impedimenta_ moved upon Hyde Park, the Champ de Mars and the Prater,
the umbrella and the oil-cloth tilt their only shield against Jupiter
Pluvius, who seemed to take especial pleasure in demonstrating their