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SWISS INGENUITY.

LETTER III.

THE SWISS INDUSTRIAL EXHIBITION-THE NEW FEDERAL PALACE-ANNUAL EXHIBITION OF WORKS OF ART.

BERN, SWITZERLAND, August 1, 1857.

The Swiss are among the most ingenious of the European nations; they possess in a high degree the constructive faculty; you have only to look at their houses to be convinced of this. It seems to me that they are the best carpenters in the world. The Swiss peasantry are lodged, I believe, in more spacious dwellings than any other peasantry in Europe -dwellings as admirably suited to their climate as they are picturesque. Under their overshadowing roofs, which form a shelter from their hot suns in summer, they hang the outer wall with balconies and galleries, which form passages above the deep snows of their winters. The ends of the beams and rafters and the braces are shaped into ornamental projections, so that what would otherwise be the deformity, becomes the grace of the building. The Swiss were long ago the best bridge-builders in Europe, of which the bridge at Schaffhausen, destroyed by the French in the latter part of the last century, constructed entirely of timber, with a span of 365 feet, yet without any support except at the two ends,

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was a remarkable example. In the long winters of the Alpine regions, the peasants employ themselves in carving, with their penknives, figures and images and objects of various kinds out of wood, with all the patience and nicety of Chinese artisans, and a hundred times the elegance. On the high-roads in the valleys of the Bernese Oberland, the traveller will have the children of the herdsmen trotting beside him, offering him for a single franc the miniature of a Swiss cottage, carved with all the delicacy of frost work.

It is clear that if all this dexterity and patience were directed to the great branches of manufacture, the Swiss must excel. It is so, in fact. I have just come from looking at an exhibition of Swiss industry now open in this beautiful city. An intelligent American gentleman went through it with me, who was as much surprised as myself, both at the variety of the manufactures and their excellence. The spectacle was to me the more interesting because the manufactures of Switzerland prosper without any of those helps which, in the opinion of some, are indispensable-without prohibitory or protective duties, or, indeed, high duties of any kind. They prosper, too, in a country surrounded by powerful governments which yet adhere to the protective system, and on which the Swiss have never thought it for their advantage to retaliate.

It must be admitted that the Swiss have some important natural advantages for manufacturing pursuits. Their mountains abound with ores of the useful metals; enormous forests are at hand to supply the furnaces in which these ores are

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FREE TRADE IN

SWITZERLAND.

waste.

smelted, and the torrents which rush down the mountain sides wield the hammers by which the metals are beaten into plates and bars. A calculating Yankee would be shocked to see the proportion of water-power in this country running to Mills might be built on the Swiss streams to manufacture for the world, without much disfiguring the grand aspect of Swiss scenery. In going up any of their mountains, you hear the bells of the herds for a vast distance around you. A million of neat cattle are fed in the pastures, with a million and a quarter of sheep and goats, and the woods which supply fuel for the forges and founderies furnish bark for tanning the skins of these animals. In the forest cantons the driver of your carriage will point out, from time to time, in some gorge of the mountains, where the stream comes down through the forest, a large building in which glass is made. The manufacturer in Switzerland has had the advantage from the first, that he has no tax to pay on the crude material which he employs.

I was not, therefore, unprepared to see in the exhibition at Bern a creditable display of objects wrought of iron and other useful metals. Here were fire engines, locomotives for the railways, which the people of the Confederation are industriously building in all parts of their country; engines for the steamers on the lakes, and machines for calico-printing-all of admirable workmanship; here were stoves for kitchen and parlor, of cast or sheet iron, which certainly in finish, if not in other respects, were beyond what we produce in our country; here were busts and statuettes in cast-iron, well

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designed, of a smoothness of surface equal to porcelain, and great precision of outline. Geneva had sent muskets, rifles. and fowling-pieces, beautifully wrought, and there were samples of cutlery from the workshops of Thurgau, Argau, Bern and Glarus, which might almost bear comparison with the cutlery of Great Britain. The Swiss make their own pins in

the mills at Schaffhausen.

Of their watches I need say

nothing, since in that branch of industry they work with greater nicety and cheapness than the people of any other country, and even furnish a large proportion of the mechanism of what are called English watches. Five cantons of Switzerland employ in watchmaking thirty-six thousand persons.

Beside the iron stoves, there were porcelain ones--white porcelain-of elegant forms, a much pleasanter and more cleanly piece of furniture than the iron ones we have at home. I cannot say much for the samples of table porcelain in the exhibition; they were of the homeliest kind, and had no pretensions to elegance. Of the plainer kinds of glass there was a respectable share, and of elegant plate glass a few samples. Switzerland furnishes the bottles for her own wines and mineral waters. The tanners of the country have by no means an idle time of it, if I might judge from the quantity of the leather, including morocco and patent leather, and the exquisitely tanned skins of the chamois goat, with which the walls of one of the lower rooms were hung.

What most surprised me in the exhibition was the perfec tion which the silk manufacture had attained. The silk

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SWISS

EMBROIDERY.

cloths of Zurich, both light and heavy, were of excellent quality, though they wanted the beauty of the French tissues, but the ribbons of Basle and Zurich vie with those of France in texture, lustre, beauty of design and brilliancy of color. Several ribbon-looms were in the exhibition-light, ingenious machines-in one of which a landscape, and in another a bouquet of flowers of different colors and shapes, were woven. The housewives, I suppose, would expect me to mention the beautiful sewing-silks of Aargau.

There are woollen mills in Zurich and elsewhere, but the quality of the goods produced is not fine; the Swiss sheep, I believe, are rather coarse-woolled. The hair of the goat is wrought into elegant and showy tissues-plaids generally, and of brilliant colors. The cotton cloths are strong and serviceable; the printed cottons are of two kinds-the calicoes and the muslins; the calicoes ugly, and the muslins delicate and beautiful. Fields of flax often meet the eye in Switzerland, and acres of linen at this season are seen bleaching by the streams. There were many good samples of linen in the exhibition.

One of the most remarkable departments of Swiss industry is embroidery, and of this there were many superb samples. In one of these, the maidens of Appenzell had embroidered their Jungfrau on an. immense curtain of white muslin. Another from the canton of St. Gallen had flowers in high relief, the petals raised from the muslin and turning back against it, as in a carving. In other samples were fountains and forests; others were of architectural design,