stration: BLAKE STONE-CRUSHER.]

Two steps, in violation of all preconceived geographical notions, but in
obedience to the Exposition authorities, land us in China, where we find
things mechanical in much the same state of progress as Marco Polo
viewed them some centuries since. The silk tissues brought from the far
East were famous in the days of the Roman magnificence, and here is the
loom. The marvel is how such a web can be made on such a rough machine.
A blue silk warp of delicate threads is in the loom, which has nine
heddles, and the partly-finished fabric shows a woof consisting of a
narrow gilded strip of paper. The sheen of the figured goods is
something remarkable. It is a parallel case to that of the shawls of
Kashmir, where the natives, trained for generations, succeed in
producing by great care and unlimited expenditure of time fabrics with
which the utmost elaboration of our machinery scarcely enables us to
compete.

The machine for the whitening of rice by the removal of the brown
coating from the pure white grain is similar to that shown from Siam at
the Centennial, but, unlike the latter, the faces of the two round
horizontal wooden blocks which act as mill-stones are serrated, whereas
the Siamese rubbers were made of sun-dried clay, the serrations
consisting of bamboo strips inserted in the clay while yet plastic. The
motion is similar, not being continuously revolving, but reciprocatory,
and the method is customary in all the rice-eating regions except India,
and is well known in parts of the latter, though not universal. The
grain of Eastern Asia, including India and Malaysia, is almost
universally rice, of which two, and even three, crops a year are raised
in some regions, and the processes of cooking are simple among these
vegetarians, the variation consisting principally in the choice of
condiments or of certain additional esculents or fruits in their season.
The grinding of grain is, however, universally known, though meal forms
but a small proportion of the daily food. The mortar and pestle in the
Chinese section show the more usual method, and there, as in some parts
of India, the pestle is placed on the end of a poised horizontal beam
which is worked by the foot of the operator at the end opposite to the
pestle.

We meet in the Chinese section with the original of our fanning-mill or
winnowing-machine for grain. Though China has had the same machines for
centuries, we have not knowingly co