" "The aim of this exhibit," said M. Jules Simon,
in a report which he made as the president of the Superior Commission,
June 15, 1888, "is to instruct the public in the history of the
processes of manual and mechanical labor, which in the passage of
centuries have resulted in the modern industrial utensils used in the
arts and trades." This exhibit has a particularly historical and
technical character. It is far from excluding objects of art, for in
several ages the utensils, those especially which were used in the
liberal arts, were veritable jewels, either from their elegance of form,
or from the richness of their material, or the grace of their details.
We find chefs-d'oeuvre, for instance on a geographical map, on the
handle of a chisel, on the barrel of a musket. Our ancestors were not
possessed with the same passion for speed and cheapness that possesses
us. Industry lost, perhaps, but the arts were the gainers. The aim of
the retrospective exhibition is well defined. It is to retrace with
broad strokes by means of the reproductions of diagrams and authentic
monuments the stages of human genius. To achieve this result it was
necessary to associate with the retrospective exhibition of labor that
of anthropologic science, in order to show in the outset what man was
when he left the hands of nature in the different physical forms of
different races.
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