866 
PARIS UNIVERSAL 
tlien either. For besides affording every desirable facility 
for the exhibition of every class of objects, in which the Crys¬ 
tal Palace of 1851 was somewhat deficient, it admitted of the 
best conceivble classification of objects by groups and by 
countries, in which, particular all previous exhibitions had 
been exceedingly faulty. Indeed it so admirably fulfilled 
every condition required of it that it may well be considered 
a model for all like buildings in the future. 
The form of the Palace was oval, like that of the ancient 
Coliseum, with an open garden in the centre. The longest 
diameter was 522 yards, the shortest 400. The length of the 
central garden was 180, width 60 yards; the great disparity 
having come of the desire to make the distance from all points 
on the circumference of this garden to opposite points on the 
circumference of the Palace exactly the same in all cases. 
In the palaces of 1851, 1855 and 1862, a portion of the arti¬ 
cles shown were in galleries proper, that is, on a second floor, a 
circumstance which added very much to the inconvenience 
and fatigue of a general survey. But in the Palace of 1867, 
everything exhibited had a place on the ground floor, so that 
every court might be traversed without changing the level so 
much as a single inch. In all former exhibition buildings, 
the exhibits were necessarily so distributed that the articles of 
any given class were sometimes half a mile apart, thus making 
a fair and satisfactory comparison difficult, if not impracticable ; 
while some of the countries, whose collections were large, were 
so bounded by simple and direct dividing alleys as to make 
it impracticable for the majority of the visitors to know when 
they had completed an examination of its products without a 
very careful study of the plan, with the diagram before them. 
In this Palace that embarrassment was entirely removed by 
the following arrangement, at once original and beautiful: 
In the first place, every country making exhibition was re¬ 
quired to display its products in a right line between the cen¬ 
tre and circumference of the Palace, the breadth of the sector 
thus formed varying with the amount of material to be shown 
by it; so that if the visitor should pass up and down this 
