voii. xxxvii. No. ay.) 
WHOLE No. 1484. f 
NEW YORK CITY, JULY 6, 1878. 
[Entered nccordintf to Act of Congress, in the year 1878, by the Rural Publishing Company, in the office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington.] 
f PRICE SIX CENTS. 
[ #2.50 PER YEAR. 
PARISIAN CORRESPONDENCE. 
Paris, .Tune 16th, 1S7S. 
The fourteen million franca which the pro¬ 
jectors of this Exhibition expected to recoivo 
from the entrance fees, hardly sooms too high an 
estimate in view of the great number of daily 
visitors down to the present time. During the 
past week the average attendance has been in 
the neighborhood of 115,000 each day, while on 
Monday last, nearly 200,000 persons entered the 
buildings either on thoTrocadoro or the Champs 
de Mars, and owing to the exhaustion of the in¬ 
dispensable printed tickets, many thousands more 
were forced to remain unwillingly outside. 
The Trocadero itself and still more its lavishly 
ornamented grounds, are favorite lounging 
places for the pleasure-loving Parisians and 
their pleasure-seeking guests. Here one of the 
prettiest and most frequented spots is the 
Japanese farm, inclosed by a bamboo palisade, 
The farm-bouse is characteristically Japanese, 
of the better class, and stands in tbo midst of a 
handsome garden. Instead of windows and 
doors, the house is furnished with shelter mats, 
which in fine weather are rolled up in order the 
better to exhil it the interior which is furnished 
in genuine Japanese fashion—a fashion whioh 
would be considered rude and insufficient in 
many of your back-woods settlements, but which 
answers admirably the simple customs and 
wants of the semi-civilized natives. 
In the garden is a poultry inclosure con¬ 
structed of the ubiquitous bamboo, and tenanted 
by a swarm of Japanese cocks and hens whose 
appearance, to the uncritioal eye, differs little 
from that of the denizens of American farm¬ 
yards, although either of your contributors, 
Messrs. Hales, Min er or Wallace, could doubt¬ 
less point out a multitude of distinctions. Close 
to theso, a bevy of ducks of far Eastern breeds, 
enjoy a large sunken tub as mightily as they 
would tho ponds or puddles of their distant na¬ 
tive land. Scattered about are large china pots 
containing Japanese plants whose beauty or 
grotesqneness would add to the charms even of 
the Rural Experimental Grounds, and there be 
fortunate in finding an eloquent pen to describe 
their attractions. 
The chief merit in the whole of this display, 
and alBo in the neighboring Chinese buildings, 
lies in the fact that they convey to the stranger 
a fair idea of the better class of architecture in 
the land which they represent, and this is a 
merit wholly lacking in the structure erected by 
the United States in the Avenue of Foreign Na¬ 
tions, across the river, on the Champs de Mara. 
In the long row of representative buildings that 
line the right side of this magnificent street, 
that which has been constructed under American 
auspices is certainly the least nationally charac¬ 
teristic, and probably the least expensive. It is 
a frame building, oblong in shape, surmounted 
with a smaller fac-simile, whioh is orowned with 
a pepper-box look-out, the whole bedecked with a 
considerable quantity of scroll-work ornamenta¬ 
tion. Of the appropriation of il50,000 made by 
Congress for the purpose of insuring a fair ex¬ 
hibition here of American products, only a very 
small percentage could have been appropriated 
to the construction of this edifice. In a land 
whose vast extent bespeaks great differences in 
the climate and appropriate dwellings of its in¬ 
habitants, the styles of architecture must neces¬ 
sarily greatly vary, but in no part of the country 
has a great deal of travel ever brought to my 
notico a building architecturally designed like 
that which is here erected as a model of Ameri¬ 
can architecture. If there really is such a thiug 
as a distinctively American Btyle of architecture, 
this certainly does not represent it; and if it is 
an embodiment of tho ideal transatlantic 
architecture of the future, the American Ideal, 
in this connection, can hardly be said, even by a 
partial friend, to be of a very high order. 
Somb of our captious Parisian critics are by no 
means complimentary in their remarks upon tho 
homely style and material of this building, and 
the en'ire absence in its design of those national 
architectural characteristics of which the struct¬ 
ures in this avenue were designed to be speci¬ 
mens. But apart from this last shortcoming, it 
is perhaps best, after all, that only a minimum 
percentage of the miserly appropriation doled 
out by Congress should have been expended on 
the merely temporary receptacle of our indus¬ 
trial exhibits. Those are displayed in a line ex¬ 
tending away back from this building which acts 
as a frontispiece on the Avenue of Foreign Na¬ 
tions; and in view of their conceded excel¬ 
lence even the most susceptible patriot can 
Givture with equanimity the sneers of unfriendly 
French writers, especially when he remembers 
the miserable display made by their oompatriots 
at our Centennial Exhibition in FuiladelpL’ia. 
Thbebeb. 
Jarm (froiwittg. 
DRAINAGE. 
PROF. B. C. CARPENTER. 
Drainage is the art of carrying off the water 
from the soil and subsoil of land by means of 
open ditches or closed drains or trenches. By 
means of drainage, wet land naturally unfit for 
cultivation has been made arable, land which 
produced only rashes and frogs has been con¬ 
verted into tbe best of meadows. Drains even 
affect tbe sanitary condition of the country, for 
it has been shown by statistics wh ch cannot be 
doubted, that on a subsoil constantly wet and 
retentive of water, diseases are much more pre¬ 
valent and vicious than in a region with a dry 
subsoil. This last consideration alone, should 
be sufficient to induce a thorough system of drain¬ 
age, for no compensation can cover the loss of 
health, or replace the value of human life. But 
the stubborn fact that drainage oosts money, 
appears to many an almost insuperable obstacle, 
and hundreds, yea, even thousands of people in 
Michigan, are breathing the pestilence from 
malarious marshes, and slowly but surely infusing 
into their system a poison which must bring 
them to an early grave, without exerting a musole 
to remove from existence the cause of all this 
evil. In many districts, where malarial diseases 
are prevalent, one-half the amount spent for 
I doctors’ bills, would effectively remove the stag- 
