The Philosopher's Mite to the Great Exhibition of 1851.

Date:
[1851?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The Philosopher's Mite to the Great Exhibition of 1851. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    conferences, ancient and modern, affords no adequate parallel, and certainly imparts no confidence. Again, reference as to the amount of influx of visitors on any former occasions, in any part of the new or old world, can avail but little towards a correct calculation of the probable extent of the forthcoming visitation ; because both the expense and difficulty of international com¬ munication, in all former times the bar to dangerous aggregation, are now reduced to a mere trifle. Neither can the official Hygeist lose sight of two important facts, that men coming from certain latitudes are prone to undergo dangerous fermentations of the blood; and, secondly, that in the modern mode of travelling men no longer reach our metropolis in groups of some half-score at a time, but by hundreds and thousands between the rising and setting of the sun. In fact, then, the philo¬ sopher has not only to look for an exhibition, hut for an exploration, since the results remain to be explored. In England, where every man’s house is his castle, through which, although the winds of heaven may penetrate, the emissaries of Government are admitted with jea¬ lousy, the difficulties of police will be greater than in any metropolis of Europe. The great jubilee of Rome created much embarrassment, and left its pestilential impress for years ; but it was a mere carnival in com¬ parison. Your learned historians, in whose society you delight, will assure you that the Crusaders of yore carried with them into various parts of Europe diseases completely exotic, and, till the wars-of the Saracens, quite unheard of in any European climate. New maps, gold and diamonds, were not the only produce