Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 17, No. 102, June, 1876

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FAÇADE OF THE SPANISH DIVISION, MAIN BUILDING.

All things being ready for their reception, how were exhibits, exhibitors and visitors to be brought to the grounds? To do this with the extreme of rapidity and cheapness was essential to a full and satisfactory attendance of both objects and persons. In a large majority of cases the first consideration with the possessor of any article deemed worthy of submission to the public eye was the cost and security of transportation. Objects of art, the most valuable and the most attractive portion of the display, are not usually very well adapted to carriage over great distances with frequent transshipments. Porcelain, glass and statuary are fragile, and paintings liable to injury from dampness and rough handling; while an antique mosaic, like the "Carthaginian Lion," a hundred square feet in superficies, might, after 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.

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This is the first opportunity the physicians of Europe have had to become fully acquainted with the advances in surgery and pathology their American brethren have the credit of having made within the past few years. They will find it illustrated in the government buildings and elsewhere; and they have an ample quid pro quo to offer from their own researches. The balancing of opinions at the proposed medical congress and in private intercourse must tend to free medical science from what remnants of empiricism still disfigure it, to perfect diagnosis and to trace with precision the operation of all remedial agents. Means remain to be found of administering the coup de grâce to the few epidemics which have not yet been extirpated, but linger in a crippled condition. This will be aided by the illustrations afforded of processes of draining, ventilation, etc.

Man's health rests in that of his stomach. The food question is a concern of the physician as well as of the publicist. The race began life on a vegetable diet, and to that it reverts when compelled by enfeebled digestion or by the increasing difficulty of providing animal food for a dense population. But it likes flesh when able to assimilate it or to procure it, and demands at least the compromise of fish. Hence, the revived attention to fish-breeding, an art wellnigh forgotten since the Reformation emptied the carp-ponds of the monks. Maryland, New York and other States illustrate this device for enhancing the food-supply, and the aquaria at Agricultural Hall, containing twelve or fifteen thousand gallons of salt and fresh water, present a congress of the leaders, gastronomically speaking, of the finny people. The shad remains not only to be naturalized in Europe, but to be reintroduced to the water-side dwellers above tide, who once met him regularly at table. He is joined by delegates from the mountain, the great lakes and the Pacific coast in the trout, the salmon and the whitefish, and by that quiet, silent and slow-going cousin of the fraternity, the oyster, most valuable of all, as possessors of those qualities not unfrequently are. Europe does not dream, and we ourselves do not realize until we come carefully to think of it, what the oyster does for us. He sustains the hardiest part of our coasting marine, paves our best roads, fertilizes our sands, enlivens all our festivities, and supports an army of packers, can-makers, etc., cased in whose panoply of tin he traverses the globe like a mail-clad knight-errant in the cause of commerce and good eating. Yet he needs protection. All this burden is greater than he can bear, and it is growing. System and science are invoked to his rescue ere he go the way of the inland shad and the salmon that became a drug to the Pilgrim Fathers. It is not easy to frame a medal or diploma for the fostering of the oyster. More effective is a consideration of the impending penalty for neglecting to do so. Ostrea edulis is one of the grand things before which prizes sink into nothingness.

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