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THE PARIS EXHIBITION, 1867. 
[Nature and Art, June 1, 866 ’ 
■*> 
THE 
T HE works for the next Great Exhibition are 
being pushed on with great activity. The 
Champ de Mars, the scene of so many brilliant 
shows, and of some follies, is undergoing a com- 
plete metamorphosis, and the mere preparatory 
labour has been enormous. It must be remembered 
that the site is three times as large as that of the 
London Exhibition building of 1862 ; that the 
ground was some feet lower than the surrounding 
roads ; in fact, just level with the river, and — which 
is almost a supererogatory statement — utterly un- 
drained. To convert this desert into a fit place to 
receive a palace for the wealth of the world, besides 
receiving the world himself, as well as his wife, was 
the problem which the Imperial Commission, the 
architects, contractors, and navvies, had to solve 
without loss of time. 
The first thing, of course, was to raise the whole j 
to the necessary level, and to do this the autho- 
rities hit upon an admirable plan. On the opposite 
side of the Seine stands, or rather did stand, the 
“ Heights of the Trocadero a considerable emi- 
nence which lies between Paris proper and the 
well-known little town of Passy, dear to English 
residents. The Trocadero has long been the despair 
of the imperial and municipal authorities, who at 
length determined to cut off the excrescence and 
throw it into the Champ de Mars ; a single line of 
rails was laid down from one to the other, passing 
over the bridge that separates them, and which has 
been divided by palings for that purpose, and the 
stuff 1 from the Trocadero carried to the hollows of 
the Champ de Mars, at the rate of sixty, or more, 
truck-loads per hour. 
The preparation of that portion of the ground 
which the building is to occupy has been completed 
for some time. The whole of the passages for 
drainage and ventilation, the latter being large 
enough to drive a coach through ; the great range 
of cellars under the outer gallery, which is to con- 
tain, not only the exhibition articles of food in 
their crude state, and in various stages of prepara- 
tion, but also all the restaurants, cafes, and other 
places of refreshment ; together with the masonry, 
which forms the foundation for the iron portion of 
the structure, are finished. The huge columns of 
the great machinery court — which will be more 
than a hundred feet wide, and upwards of eighty 
in height to the girders, and will form the most 
remarkable portion of the building — are being 
reared rapidly in pairs, several of which are now 
connected by their curved girders, and look like the 
framework of triumphal arches for the passage of 
a giant army. The other portions of the iron 
work are also in hand ; and the walls of the two 
inner galleries, to contain the fine art and retro- 
spective collections, are nearly half finished. These 
two galleries have been built of stone, in order to 
exclude, as much as possible, not only dust, but 
1867. 
noise. The position of the various parts of the 
building, the principal avenues, and the inner 
garden, can now all be traced with little diffi- 
culty. 
The trucks are constantly passing over the Pont 
de Jena with the debris of the Trocadero ; but 
this is for the formation of the subsoil of the park, 
where, however, the earthworks are approaching a 
conclusion. 
All the world knows by this time, we presume, 
that the Imperial Commission has for its honorary 
president the Prince Imperial, son of the Emperor, 
with the Minister of State as the acting president, 
the Ministers of Commerce and of the Beaux Arts 
for vice-presidents, and M. Le Play (who acted in 
the same capacity in Paris in 1855, and in London 
in 1862) as Commissaire-General. We presume 
i also that it is known, almost as generally, that the 
building is to be of an irregular ovoid form — in fact, 
a short body with semicircular ends ; that the 
classes are to be placed in concentric divisions, 
galleries as they are called — the building being, 
however, all on one floor, an immense advantage 
— commencing with the Fine Arts and ending with 
Machinery ; and that as each exhibiting country 
will have a space enclosed between two radii — a slice 
as it were of the great international cake — each will 
have a portion of all the concentric galleries ; thus 
visitors will be able to examine the contents of the 
Exhibition either in geographical or systematic 
order, as may best suit their purposes or their 
inclinations. 
The Universal Exhibition of 1867 will surpass 
all its predecessors not only in actual extent, but 
also in the comprehensiveness of its design : it will 
include all that was comprised in former plans, 
and several important features in addition. As 
regards the former portion of the programme, little 
need be said : there is no doubt that the classes of 
raw materials, tools, machinery, and manufactured 
products, as well as that of the Fine Arts, will 
all exhibit a proportionate amount of progress ; and 
the applications for space have been greatly beyond 
the capacities of the building. 
As regards the new features, they nearly all re- 
late to art, science, and the condition of the labour- 
ing population of the world, and therefore present 
many points of especial attraction for the readers 
of Nature and Art. 
The site devoted to the Exhibition is a parallelo- 
gram rather more than 3,250 feet long by 1,365 feet 
wide; the building will measure about 1,600 feet 
by 1,250 feet, and in consequence of its rounded 
form a very large space of ground will be left un- 
occupied. Moreover, the inner Avail of the building 
will circumscribe a garden more than 500 feet long 
by nearly 200 feet broad. This large extent of 
park and garden will afford means which former 
Exhibitions have only possessed to a very small 
PARIS EXHIBITION, 
