idiary machines for dressing
the fabrics are here also--for napping, teasling, shearing, stretching
and brushing, for measuring, folding and packing.

The other modes of making fabrics shown are a machine for making
fishing-nets of great width, and a number of knitting-machines, from the
stocking-frame of eighty years ago to the small domestic machine, and
the larger one with nine hundred needles in the circumference and making
a circular seamless fabric eighteen inches in diameter. The march of
improvement is eminently shown here, where an old man is patiently
knitting a flat web of ten inches with a series of five motions between
the rows of stitches, while just by are the circular machines, whose
motions are so rapid that the clicks of the needles merge into a whir,
and a man is able to attend to six machines, making one hundred and
thirty pounds of knitted goods per day.

Passing the large exhibit of machines for the working of fibres
preliminary to the loom--the carding, roving, spinning, reeling and
warping--and the allied but different machines which make wire-cloths of
different meshes and size, we come to the ropemaking-machines for hemp
and wire, which are shown principally in their products, the
manufacture taking an amount of room and material which could hardly be
expected to be efficiently shown in a crowded building where space is
valuable.

The French plant for boring small shafts to find water or obtain
sections of the strata, and the larger ones for sinking large ones for
mines, are shown by several exhibitors. The annular drills remove
cylindrical sections of the strata from ten to sixty centimetres in
diameter: the large chisels resemble those described in the Belgian
exhibit, having a diameter of four metres and a weight of twenty-five
thousand kilos.

The department of mining has some excellent large models of mining
districts, in which the face of the country is represented with the
natural undulations, the villages, roads, fields and streams, and made
in removal-sections which expose the underlying strata, the galleries,
drifts and shafts of the subterranean world.

An attempt to describe the steam-engines, of such various size, shape,
position and capacity, would exhaust all the space permissible in a
magazine article.

The wood-working tools of France are excellent, and our manufacturers
must look well to their laurels. We have as yet the advantage in
compactness and simplicity, with ad