INTRODUCTION.

The vastness of the multitudes, who have flocked to examine and derive instructionfrom the thousands of objects displayed at the Great Exhibition of Industry of 1851, isscarcely less remarkable, than the pertinacity with which all, whose business or inclinationinterests them in the great office of production, return again and again for the purposeof imprinting on their memories the aspect of works admirable for abstract perfection,or as affecting those specialties with which each visitor may be connected. A con-sideration of the above fact has induced the Author to believe, that a publication, inwhich the most beautiful objects he might be enabled to select should be reproduced,through the best means of graphic representation available in the present day, could notfail to be at once useful and popular.

It has been remarked, that in History a great combination of circumstances hasrarely occurred without having been accompanied by the developement of a master mind,the native powers of which, moulded to specific form by those circumstances, have inturn reacted upon the conjunction of events, and so created those turning points ofStory which survive conspicuous, while all around is lost in darkness and obscurity.It is from the traditions of such epochs that Historians have been enabled to furnishliving pictures of past events. In Art it is a no less regular phenomenon, that when-ever the aesthetic tendencies of nations have demanded the embodiment of some greattransitional phase of imagination, the fitting artist has seldom failed to erect correspondentmonuments, thereby setting up beacons by which after ages, in looking back over theintervening sea of time, have been enabled to recognise the great features of physicaland mental eccentricity, stamped on every crumbling relic of tower, tomb, temple,basilica, mosque, church, god , saint, or prophet.

In Industry, an analogous coincidence has obtained between the mental and physicalrequirements of nations, and the developement of appropriate manufactures,—the forms

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