134 A Field Naturalists Holiday. [Sess. 
Next day we paid our first visit to the Exhibition, and 
passed through the Porte Monumentale, which we took time 
to study a little in brilliant sunlight. From its shining green- 
and-gold decoration the irreverent Parisians dubbed it the § 
Salamander. By daylight it was also very striking. It is 
known to few, I daresay, of those who saw it that the archi- 
tect who designed it studied for some time carefully at the 
Museum of Natural History the most lowly forms of animal 
life, the beautiful patterns of foraminifera and radiolaria, to 
give him the necessary inspiration for his work: and the 
lattice-work of this great monumental gate is covered over 
with magnified casts of these beautiful organisms—what 
Haeckel would call the “Kunst formen der Natur,” and to 
illustrate which he is publishing just now a large handsome 
volume. Is it not a very fine idea to pass through the low- 
liest of living things and yet some of the most beautiful to be 
admitted into the great world show where there are displayed 
the most developed results of human labour and thought ? 
The Exhibition, is full of such ideas, artistic ideas—not objects 
and facts scattered altogether at random, but connected by 
threads of synthetic thought, which the tourist who goes to the 
Exhibition for a few days mostly fails entirely to notice. 
As I have said, I went to Paris a good fortnight before the 
Congress, and I spent nearly all that time about the Exhibi- 
tion. The Exhibition covers, with its annex at Vincennes, 500 
acres, and all the buildings had galleries. Supposing that I 
had spent a solid fortnight in seeing the Exhibition, that would 
have given me 33 acres a-day to go over, not including the 
galleries. The most of it, of course, one only walked through, — 
and perhaps three-fourths of the Exhibition I did not attempt 
to see at all. Still, I believe I walked a good twelve miles © 
every day, and so by the end of my first fortnight I had a 
fairly good idea how to find my way about. Now suppose, 
after I knew my way about, I had met a party of Edin- 
burgh Field Naturalists, it would have given me much 
sien to have had a few walks with them to places in 
the Exhibition, to see which would have given them great 
delight. I propose to take you now to some of these places. 
We have entered by the Porte Monumentale, and we walk 
along a broad avenue, having for a third of a mile two rows — 
