The models, plans and raised maps of the hydraulic works of Holland are ever wonderful. They are principally the same that were exhibited in the Main Building at the Centennial, but there are some additional ones. All other drainage enterprises sink into insignificance beside those of Holland. Since 1440 they have gradually extended until they include an area of 223,062 acres drained by mechanical means. The drainage of the Haarlem Meer (45,230 acres), which was the last large work completed, is abundantly illustrated here, both as to the canalization and the engines, the latter of which are among the largest in the world. The engines are three in number, and the cylinders of the annular kind, the outer ones twelve feet in diameter, and each engine lifting 66 tons of water at a stroke: in emergencies each is capable of lifting 109 tons of water at a stroke to a height of 10 feet at a cost of 2-1/4 pounds of coal per horse-power per hour—much cheaper than oats: 75,000,000 pounds are raised 1 foot high by a bushel of coal. The next great work is the drainage of the southern lobe of the Zuyder Zee, the plans for which have been made and the work commenced. It is estimated that the mean depth is 13 feet, and that by a multitude of engines the water may be removed at the rate of 1 foot of depth per annum. Some 800,000,000 tons were pumped out of the Haarlem Meer, but that work will be dwarfed by the new enterprise.
The Dutch system of mattresses, gabions, revetting and sea-walls have furnished models for all the continents, the mouths of the Danube and the Mississippi being prominent instances. The railway bridge over the Leek, an arm of the Rhine, at Kuilinburg in Holland, is an iron truss, and the principal span has the same length as the middle arch of the St. Louis bridge—515 feet. It is shown here by models and plans.
The largest and most instructive ethnological exhibit from any country at the Exposition is that from the Netherlands colonies in the East and West Indies. The Oriental forms by far the larger portion of it, and has an imposing trophy in one of the four most advantageous positions in the building. The base of the apartment is about one hundred and forty feet square, and the domed ceiling at a height of one hundred and fifty feet rises from a square tower whose sides are round-topped windows of blue and white glass in chequerwork. These give full illumination and a gay appearance to the spacious hall, in which the trophy rises to a height of eighty feet. The pyramidal structure has an octagonal base of forty feet diameter with inclined faces, from which rises a second octagonal portion of smaller size. A series of steps above this is crowned with a conical sheaf of palm-stems, whose fronds make an umbrella of twenty feet diameter. The peak is a pinnacle of bamboos, with a Dutch flag pendent in the still atmosphere of the hall. From each angle and side of the octagon radiates a table, and these are lavishly covered with specimens of the arts and manufactures of Java, Sumatra, Borneo, Celebes and other of the Dutch colonial possessions in the Malay seas. Here are models of the junks, proas and fishing-craft, each structure pegged together and destitute of nails. The large mat sails depend from yards of bamboo; the rudders are large oars, one over each counter; the decks are roofed with bamboo, ratan and the inevitable nipa-palm leaves. The smaller craft, made of hollow tree-trunks, have the double outrigger, and the finer ones have shelters of bamboo and palm-leaf. The fishing-craft have large dip-nets suspended from bamboo poles by cords, which allow them to be drawn up when a passing school of fish is observed by a man perched above.
On another table are models of the fishing-weirs and traps made of poles which must be forty feet long in the originals, and are driven closely alongside each other so as to enclose and detain the fish, which may enter at the funnel-shaped mouth, whose divergent sides are presented up stream. On the bamboo piles are the floors supporting the palm-leaf shelters of the fishing family, and upon the various parts of the structure lie the spears, rods and nets by which the fish are withdrawn from the inner pond, which it is so easy to enter and so hard to escape from. Various forms of weirs are shown, and a multitude of fish-baskets, whose conical entrances obligingly expand to the curious fish, but only present points to him when he seeks to return. Bamboo and ratan, whole or split, afford the materials for all these baskets and cages.
Other tables have the land-structures, from the elaborately-carved wooden bungalow with tiled roof of the residency of Japara in Java to the bamboo hut with palm-leaf sides and roofs of the maritime Dyaks of Borneo. Here we have a bazaar of Banda, and there a hut of the indigenes of Buitzenzorg in the interior of the fertile island of Java. Among the rudest houses shown are those of Celebes, that curious island, larger than Britain, which seems to rival the sea-monster, with its arms sprawling upon the map. One house on stilts is fitted up with a complete equipment of musical instruments, the wooden and brass harmonicons with bars or inverted pans resting upon strings and beaten with mallets. Here also is a weighing-machine for sugar products, the floor resting upon the shorter beam of a lever, while the long arm extends far out of doors. Rice-granaries elevated on posts above the predatory vermin are shown in various forms, and are set in water-holes to guard against the still more obnoxious ants, which are not content with the grain, but eat house and all.
Another table has implements of agriculture—ploughs, harrows, rakes, carts, sleds, all as innocent of metal as the oxen which draw the various instruments; wheels for irrigation made of bamboo, both frame and buckets; various cutting, weeding and grubbing implements, made by a sort of rude Catalan process from the native iron ore. The plough is a little better than that of Egypt of three thousand years ago, and the sickle is inferior. When Sir Stamford Raffles, who was governor during the short control of Java by the British, asked why they used the little primitive bent knife (ana-ana) which severs from the stalk but a few heads of rice at a time, they answered that if they presumed to do otherwise their next crop would be blasted.
One of the tables, however, furnishes a grave disappointment. It is an innocent-looking suspension bridge, the middle third of which is supported by a series of piles and the floor roofed in with canes and palm-leaves. It is a model of a bridge over the Boitang Toro, and one expects to find it of the ratan which is of general use and grows two hundred and fifty feet long; but no: it is of telegraph wire! So much for the intrusion of modern devices when one is revelling in one of the most interesting ethnological exhibits ever gathered. We have, however, but to turn round to be consoled. Here is the roller cotton-gin, which was doubtless used in India before the conquests of Alexander. Then we have the spinning-wheel, which differs in no important respect from that of England in the thirteenth century, and is similar to, but ruder than, that used by our great-grandmothers, when "spinster" meant something, and a girl brought to the home of her choice a goodly array of linen. This was before cotton was king, and before factories were known either for cotton, flax or wool. Was it a better day than the present, or no? Things work round, and the roller-gin is now the better machine, having in the most perfected processes supplanted the saw-gin. This may be news to some, but will be admitted by those who have examined what the present Exposition has to show. Here also is the bow for bowing the cotton, the original cotton-opener and cleaner. We cannot, either, omit the reeling mechanism for the thread nor the looms of simple construction, which can by no means cost over a couple of dollars and yet make fine check stuffs, good cotton ginghams. Perhaps we might allow another dollar for the reed with its six hundred dents of split ratan.
Curious and bizarre chintzes are shown in connection with the machinery, and some doubtless made by the processes described by Pliny eighteen hundred years ago. Other calicoes are made by at least two processes which are comparatively modern in England, but certainly two thousand years old in Asia. One is the direct application of a dye-charged stamp upon the goods. Another is known by us as the resist process, and consists in printing with a material which will exclude the dye; then putting the goods in the dye-tub; subsequently washing out the resist-paste, when the stamped pattern shows white on a colored ground. Some of the pieces of calico make me suspect the discharge process also, in which a piece of goods, having been dyed, is stamped in patterns with a material which has the faculty of making the dye fugitive, when washing causes the pattern to appear white on a colored ground.