AMERICAN INDUSTRIAL EXPOSITIONS. 231 



in a world ideal, suggested, no doubt, by what is actual and liable 

 here and there to coincide with truth; the generalization of the sci- 

 entific man is likewise a vision, but it rests upon the actual, upon 

 the ascertained fact at the greatest number of points possible, and 

 disappoints us only that it is not everywhere coincident. The poet 

 dreams of Atlantis, the lost continents, the islands of the blest, and 

 builds us pictures that vanish with his song; the man of science 

 too beholds the continents rise; scene after scene he likewise makes 

 to pass across our startled vision; but his are history, his tapestries are 

 wrought in the loom of time. 



The poet writes the book of Genesis, with the herbs bringing forth 

 fruit after their kind; the man of science figures fossil leaves and 

 cones and fruit. Only at the last do poetry and science possibly 

 again agree: 



" The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, 

 The solemn temples, the great globe itself 

 Yea, all which it inherit shall dissolve, 

 And like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind ! " 



And when the man of science gathers all his data, and collates 

 fact with fact, and builds the superstructure of his vision, with him, 

 too, all things fade and vanish in the infinity of the future. 



AMERICAN INDUSTRIAL EXPOSITIONS THEIR 

 PURPOSES AND BENEFITS. 



BY MARCUS BENJAMIN, Pn. D. 



INDUSTRIAL expositions are a natural development of the fairs 

 of the middle ages. The latter are believed to have originated in 

 the religious gatherings which afforded an opportunity for the sale 

 of wares to large numbers of people. Such fairs still persist in 

 northern Europe, and the best known of them is probably that held 

 three times a year in Leipsic, to which, it is said, " some twenty-five 

 or thirty thousand foreign merchants " are still attracted each year. 



In course of time international exhibitions at which specimens 

 of the arts and industries of the great nations of the world were con- 

 trasted came into vogue. These began with the International Ex- 

 hibition held in London in 1851, and of them three have been held 

 in the United States, as follows: The first in New York, in 1853; the 

 second in Philadelphia, in 1876; and the third in Chicago, in 1893. 

 The great magnitude of such expositions has led in recent years to their 

 specialization or subdivision into expositions at which only a specialty 

 was presented. Notable among such have been the following, which 



