ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS 



BEFORE THE AMERICAN INSTITUTE, " ON THE ORIGIN AND 

 HISTORY OF INSTITUTIONS FOR THE PROMOTION OF THE 

 USEFUL ARTS," DELIVERED AT THE HALL OP THE NEW 

 YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY, ON THE lltli OF NOVEMBER, 

 1863, BY CHARLES P. DALY, LL.D. 



Gentlemen of the Institute : 



Having accepted your invitation to deliver a discourse upon the 

 thirty-fifth anniversary of your Institution, it will naturally be ex- 

 pected that I should do something in furtherance of the object of 

 your organization, and this duty I propose to discharge by an ac- 

 count of the origin and history of Institutions for the promotion of 

 the useful arts. 



I have selected this subject because it embraces a kind of infor- 

 mation which it is not very easy to obtain. It has to be drawn 

 from a great variety of sources, and has never, as far as I know, 

 been brought together in a collected form. It is exceedingly inter- 

 esting, and will be found to be very instructive. 



That public mode of bringing before a people the evidence of 

 their progress in the useful arts, which in this country and in Eng- 

 land is called a Fair, is in France distinguished by the more discri- 

 minating appellation of an Industrial Exhibition. A Fair in fact 

 is something very different ; and as that institution, once exten- 

 sively spread over Europe, is now rapidly passing away, and has in 

 some countries ceased altogether, it will be both interesting, and 

 at the same time, a proper opening of my subject, to give some 

 account of it. 



A Fair, in fact, was nothing else but a market, as its name de- 

 notes, which is derived from the Roman word " Forum," signifying 

 a market place. It was a coming together of merchants, farmers 

 and traders, periodically at some fixed place, for an interchange 

 or for the sale of commodities ; and, though many things were 

 inseparably connected with it as the necessary consequence of the 

 assembling of a large number of people, its chief object, whether 

 confined to the inhabitants of a particular district, or embracing, 

 as many of the large fairs did, merchants and traders from every 

 quarter of the globe, was uniformly the same — a general traffic in 

 merchandize. It was an institution that arose from necessity in 

 the earlier stages of society, or in countries where the popula- 



