66
EXPOSITION AT VIENNA.
recommended to the attention of our citizens. In the department of forestry, most striking exhibitions were made,—the leading schools, forestry associations and departments, in a number of instances erecting large houses in the rough style of the forest buildings to illustrate this work. These were filled with specimens of the native woods, worked and unworked, of the various articles produced from the wood in the forests or in their neighborhood, samples of machinery and tools used, and especially with maps, plans, models of dams, slides, rope-tramways, and all the means of illustrating their modes of carrying on their work. With these were numerous books on the subject and many volumes of written reports, showing the details of the management.
From the great attention given by the Austrians and other older nations to this branch of industry, we should do well to draw a lesson. It is believed that if the State would constitute either a special commission, or a branch of the board of agriculture, that should give particular attention to the subject of forestry, should examine the foreign modes of encouraging arboriculture and making it pecuniarily productive, and should aim at giving popular information and awakening popular interest on the subject, it would be vastly to the interest and advantage of the Commonwealth.
But if in those industries which tend to the physical comfort • and convenience of mankind the United States stood as high as, and in many respects higher than, other countries, in the \
Exposition, it was far otherwise in the sphere of art, both in •
its purer conditions of painting and sculpture and in its application to manufactures. In the preparation for the Exposition in this country, those gentlemen who originally had the } charge of our interests did not, with one or two exceptions, apparently command the confidence of our artists nor of our ]■
manufacturers who depend on their art or taste to give value ;
to their works, sufficiently to persuade them to send their pro- *
ductions to Vienna. • Moreover, a single walk through the art- l.
galleries and down the great nave of the industrial palace, in f
which the exhibits of the applied arts were generally assem- | .
bled, would have satisfied the most doubting that if we had R
done the best we could we should have still made a most de- j
plorable failure in this side of the Exposition. [