[29] See Proceedings of British Association at Glasgow, 1855, p. 203; also Minutes of Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, vol. xv., 1856.

These drawings and notations would have required for their exhibition about seven or eight hundred square feet of wall. My letter to Mr. Gravatt was forwarded to the Com­mis­sion­ers with his own application for space to exhibit them. The Com­mis­sion­ers declined this offer; yet during the first six weeks of the Exhibition there was at a short distance from the Difference Engine an empty space of wall large enough for the greater part of these instructive diagrams. This portion of wall was afterwards filled up by a vast oil-cloth. Other large portions of wall, to the amount of thousands of square feet, were given up to other oil-cloths, and to numberless carpets. It is evident the Royal Com­mis­sion­ers were much better qualified to judge of furniture for the feet than of furniture for the head.

I was myself frequently asked why I did not employ a person to explain the Difference Engine. In reply to some of my friends, I inquired whether, when they purchased a carriage, they expected the builder to pay the wages of their coachman.

〈FOREIGN VISITORS PUZZLED.〉

But my greatest difficulty was with foreigners; no explanation I could devise, and I tried many, appeared at all {157} to satisfy their minds. The thing seemed to them entirely in­com­pre­hen­sible.

That the nation possessing the greatest military and commercial marine in the world—the nation which had spent so much in endeavouring to render perfect the means of finding the longitude—which had recently caused to be computed and published at considerable expense an entirely new set of lunar Tables should not have availed itself at any cost of mechanical means of computing and stereotyping such Tables, seemed entirely beyond their comprehension.

At last they asked me whether the Com­mis­sion­ers were bêtes. I assured them that the only one with whom I was personally acquainted certainly was not.

When hard pressed by difficult questions, I thought it my duty as an Englishman to save my country’s character, even at the expense of my own. So on one occasion I suggested to my unsatisfied friends that Com­mis­sion­ers were usually selected from the highest class of society, and that possibly four out of five had never heard of my name.

But here again my generous efforts to save the character of my country and its Com­mis­sion­ers entirely failed. Several of my foreign friends had known me in their own homes, and had seen the estimation in which I was held by their own countrymen and by their own sovereign. These were still more astonished.

〈CHINESE INQUIRE ABOUT IT.〉