212 The New Temple of Industry . 



and supposes that lie simply sailed down the Amazon, and then 

 followed the line of the coast to the N.-W. till he reached Mar- 

 garita, a little beyond Trinidad. Mr. Markham goes so far as 

 to represent the Bio Negro track as the one which is sanctioned 

 by Shnon's narrative. Such a conclusion does not, however, 

 seem warranted by the text, and it would have been more pru- 

 dent, if Mr. Markham had avoided committing himself to what 

 will probably prove an untenable theory, not sustained by a sin- 

 gle indubitable fact. "We do not discover in Mr. Bollaert's 

 portion of the volume before us any indications of his supporting 

 the more improbable view. 



THE NEW TEMPLE OF INDUSTRY. 



BY JOHN HOLLINGSHEAD. 



If the building raised at South Kensington for the Second 

 Great International Exhibition had not been practically the 

 work of a not over modest department of the State, it is pos- 

 sible that it might have been quietly accepted as one of those 

 costly makeshifts for which, as a nation, we are rather famous. 

 A few keen critics would doubtless have questioned the claim 

 of its designer to be immortalized as a constructive genius ; 

 a few imaginative architects, who love to turn all our black 

 riverside wharves into marble palaces on paper, and dream of 

 reviving the glories of ancient Babylon at Holborn Hill, would 

 have shown us pretty fancy chromo-lithographs of what it 

 might have been, while the majority of practical exhibitors 

 would have been satisfied with it as a shed that had the merit 

 of being water-tight and sun-proof. 



The building designed by Captain Fowke, however, can 

 claim no pity on account of its parentage. It springs from the 

 very centre of a school which aspires to teach the true princi- 

 ples of designing art to an ignorant and benighted country. 

 From the days when Marlborough House schoolmasters lectured 

 us upon our barbarously-coloured carpets, designed shirts, and 

 shaped wine-glasses, to this present period, when the South 

 Kensington Museum gets two hundred thousand pounds at a 

 time from a not very flourishing exchequer to enable it to teach 

 its doctrines, we have been loudly told where to go to if wo 

 want to improve our taste. We have been carefully directed 

 to the one existing college whose professors believe they pos- 

 sess the only true eye for harmony of form and colour, and 

 whose missionaries, duly primed at head-quarters, are actively 

 teaching South Kensington art throughout the country in local 



