But Austria is not beery alone. She has fine exhibits in horology, electric and pneumatic telegraphy, and in tools, grain-mills, gang-saw mills, and machines for making paper bags. More important, as some might say, are the admirable locomotives and stationary engines, cars, fire-engines, and her collection of iron-work, in which are exhibited cast-iron car-wheels, made by Ganz & Co. of Buda-Pesth, which have been in use twenty-one years and have run without apparent severe injury a distance of 549,108 kilomètres, or nearly 280,700 miles.
The beet-root sugar interest is becoming very important in Austria, but the evidences of the Exhibition indicate that the diffusion-process holds better credit there than in France, where it is not approved of. The rotative apparatus shown is an immense affair, with a series of eight tall tanks arranged on a circular carriage and rotating on a vertical axis, so as to bring each in turn to the charging and discharging positions. Each tank has its own system of pumps. Beet-root is difficult to exploit for various reasons, chemical and other. Like the vine, it is particular in its nutriment, requires great skill to remove extraneous substances, and can hardly be handled by the French system without a set of machinery costing about eighty thousand dollars.
From Austria to Spain is but a step, but it is not productive of much information in the matter we have in hand. A beaming-machine for cotton warps, red, white and yellow, stands solitary in its section, and next to it is a model of a cirque de taureau, composed of nineteen thousand pieces of tin laboriously put together without solder, as if that were a merit, and stated to be the work of two years. In the arena the wooden bull regards with indifference two mounted cavaliers and seven footmen in various provoking attitudes. Near by are various machines and presses for the treatment of grapes and olives, grinders and presses in variety, a sugar-cane press and a turbine. Barcelona would seem to be the most enterprising of Spanish cities. Several exemplifications of the excellent iron of Catalonia and Biscay suggest the direction in which Spain has taken its most important industrial start of late years. An admirable model of the quay of the copper-mining company of the Rio Tinto is another evidence in the same line which the maps, plans and ores amply corroborate.
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 copied many of them. The fanning-mill, porcelain and the cheng may be fairly credited to her. The last is the original of all our free-reed musical instruments. It is shown here, and was also at the Centennial, and it was the carrying of one overland to Russia, where it fell into the hands of Kratzenstein, the organ-builder to Queen Catharine II., which initiated the free reed in Europe, and led to the accordions, concertinas, harmoniums and parlor organs which perhaps afford the cheapest and loudest music for a given expenditure of muscle and wind of anything we have.
The spinning and winding machinery of China is simple enough, but so much like that of our great-grandmothers that it does not arrest particular attention. It is otherwise with the irrigating-machine, which in its various modifications produces, by the fruitfulness induced, the food of scores of millions in China, India, Syria and Egypt—the cogged wheel on a vertical axis, with an ox travelling beneath it, and a horizontal shaft moved thereby and carrying an endless chain of pots or buckets, either hanging from the cord or moving in an inclined chute.
The ploughs, harrows, rakes, flails, spades, hoes and forks are of the usual clumsy description, not to be apprehended by the reader without cuts, and many of them only reasonably effective even in the mellow soil repeatedly stirred and occasionally flooded with water. The seed-drill for planting one row, with a share on each side to turn soil on to the grain, is an anticipation of some later inventions nearer home. The thresher is a square frame drawn over the grain—which is spread upon the bare ground—and is furnished on its under side with steel blades which not only shell the grain out of the ear, but also reduce the straw into chaff, which is desirable, as storing for feed more conveniently. Southern nations have but little conception of our use of hay. Grain for the man and straw for the beast is the usual division. The ancient Roman tribulum and the modern Syrian morej, were or are similar, and the "sharp" threshing instrument of Isaiah may be seen to-day in the Tunis exhibit, being a frame of boards with sharp flint spalls inserted into its under surface.