from overloaded chimneys, from any burning of papers below, and the charring of some ill-placed beam above! A method of warming ourselves so barbarous as this cannot go on for ever. What is likely to happen?
An Exhibition like the past and the proximate is just the machinery for ameliorating the evil. A great deal has been done for many years past. Before Prince Albert was born, the invention of hotwater pipes was applied to conservatories and a few noblemen's mansions; and we have since heard a great deal about economical stoves, and a cleanly consumption of smoke, and hot air, and hot water, and prepared fuel, and cooking by gas, &c., &c. Still, we go on burning the raw mineral, either to warm ourselves, or to heat something which is to warm us. We may have been enriched, a few weeks hence, by fresh suggestions about dealing with the inconveniences; but do we not all believe that some future generation will be warmed without any use of coal at all?—without the burning of any raw material at all? Some of us know that there is a discovery, actually existing among us, of a way of producing and administering heat by means of—Well, I will not specify the method, which it should be left to qualified persons to describe. Suffice it that the requisites are iron and rapid motion, without any fire or fuel at all. The discovery waits for the invention of a method of application more economical than the use of coal. That invention cannot be far off: if it is indeed the only thing wanted: and then, when we have got rid of dirt, smoke, danger, and waste of time, space, and labour, we shall recognise a change in our warming system analogous to that in our lighting.
In connection with the Exhibition, then, we may anticipate any advance which belongs to the lower of the two methods; whereas the higher occurs in the ripeness of time and of men's wits, in complete independence of Exhibitions, and usually of any kind of consultation or demonstration.
Thus learning to confine our expectations within obvious limits, we may fairly speculate on some benefits of convenience likely to arise from the Exhibition. We may consider what are the in conveniences which vex us most; and we shall do well to remember that the way in which amelioration proceeds is usually by simplifying what is complicated and cumbrous.
Almost all improvement in the arts of life has followed this course. Barbaric people have no other idea than of doing everything themselves; whereas the civilised set the agencies of Nature to work for them. From the desperate hard work of kindling fire by twirling a stick in a hole, men got on to the tinder-box, or the burning~glass, and at last to the lucifer-match. The marines of ancient potentates voyaged in ships impelled by the muscular force of scores of rowers, whose oars and other appliances cost a world of trouble and toil; and in time the hoisting and management of a sail enabled three or four men to carry a company of soldiers faster and further than as many score of rowers. The two most conspicuous and familiar instances of this kind of advance are printing and spinning. I need not dwell on the contrast between the monks and other scribes of past centuries. painting every stroke of every letter with a. hair-pencil, or drawing it with a pen, and the pressmen in Printing-House Square, who supply copies millions of times faster than could have been imagined a thousand years ago. Travellers who have seen the Alpine women busy with their distafffs at every turn of the road, or the veiled Arab girls in the yellow desert, spinning the single thread of black wool for ever, and never getting enough, can tell what our Lancashire and Yorkshire mills are as a token of civilisation, and a help to more. Of late we have all been struck by an instance which at present naturally seems to us the most wonderful of all. In the tombs at Thebes, and in the rock temples of India, and in ancient Chinese paintings, we see what a world of pains any representation of objects occasioned to the artist. The little squares into which the Egyptian painter divided his surface show what the merest approach to proportion cost him. In course of ages the art of engraving, by which copies were multiplied, seemed the highest triumph that the case admitted of. Yet the painter went on with stroke upon stroke, and the engraver with line upon line, spending years on, not only the imaginative, but the mechanical part of the work. Now we make the sun our artist; and he does the work in a second of time.
Thus we see in what direction to look for the remedy for our inconveniences.
We make an enormous waste of time and effort every day of our lives in going through details, if indeed it is the function of Nature's forces to do that kind of business for us. It is not long since nearly all the women of every nation, and a great number of the men spent hours of every day in plying the needle; in threading it, in pushing it through and pulling it out, by an effort which engaged most of the muscles of the frame, and which is peculiarly wearing to certain sets of nerves. A few years since, a portion of this labour was saved by machinery which shaped some of our garments, and which finished them at the edges. This was a boon, as far as it went; but now we have the sewing-machine, by which the human use of the needle is superseded, and all the injuriousncss of the employment abolished. An easy treadle does it all, with the help of such ingenuity and. care as all useful employment requires.
What further do we most need in the same direction?
The cumbrousness of our method of writing no doubt strikes us all at times. In our mechanical age it is wonderful that no further advance has yet been made towards simplicity. What an apparatus is this of pen, ink and paper! The invention of steel pens goes but a little way to wards improvement. There is some saving of time in buying our pens ready made; and a trifle of cost: but the use of metal pens instead of the elastic quill is a severe penalty on the saving. School ushers and counting-house clerks may be glad to be saved the old drudgery of pen making and mending; but authors and domestic correspondents prefer nibbing their pens while collecting their ideas to scratching their paper with metal