, long enough, if
unrolled, to put a girdle thirty times round the globe, though not all
of it warranted to stand the washing-test that would be imposed by the
briny part of the circuit.

And yet there were visible in the American department germs
of original inventions and adaptations, the development and
fructification of which in the near future were foreseen by acute
observers. Our metallic life-boats were then unknown to other
countries, those of England being all of wood. The screw-propeller
was quite a new thing, though the Princeton had carried it, or been
carried by it, into the Mediterranean ten years before. Engines
designed for its propulsion attracted special attention. The
side-wheel reigned supreme among British war-steamers, although some
of the altered liners which cut such an imposing figure till the
Sebastopol forts in '55 checked, and iron-clads in '62 finished,
their career, were under way. A model of one of them, The Queen, was
exhibited as the highest exemplification of "the progress of art
as applied to shipbuilding during the last eighteen centuries"--a
progress entirely eclipsed by that of the subsequent eighteen years.

We sent no steam fire-engines, no locomotives, and no cars. Our great
printing-presses, since largely borrowed from and imported by Europe,
were scarcely noticed. Not so with "a most beautiful little machine"
for making card wire-cloth, copied from America. Recognition of the
supreme merits of the pianos of Chickering, Steinway and the rest was
still wanting, Erard's Parisian instruments bearing the bell. Borden's
meat-biscuit--to revert to the practical--caused quite a sensation,
the Admiralty being overloaded with spoiled and condemned _preserved_
meat. The American daguerreotypes on exhibition were pronounced
decidedly superior to those of France, and still more to those of
England. Whipple displayed the first photograph taken of the moon,
thus securing to this country the credit of having broken ground for
the application of the new art to astronomy. No photograph of a star
or of the sun had been obtained. The distance between the United
States and Europe in the application and improvement of photography
cannot be said, notwithstanding our advantage in climate, to have been
since widened. A field of competition still lies open before them in
the fixing of color by the camera and the sensitive surface. The
sun still insists on doing his work with India ink and keeping his