The interest in the approaching Centennial celebration at Philadelphia is daily widening and extending, and if those entrusted with its management prove themselves competent for the work, and show that they are duly inspired with its breadth and its significance to the world, before the end of the present year there will not be a hamlet in the land whose citizens are not made prouder of their nationality and individually anxious to contribute something to its glory. It should be made the grandest occasion of the kind which the world has ever witnessed, for if it be anything less than that, it will fail to respond to the honest aspirations and generous pride of the American heart. Aside from the museum proper--the collection of past and present manufactures, past and present implements of industry--every day should witness some grand tournament, like that trial of grain-reapers which took place at the exposition at Paris in 1855. The scene was a splendid field of grain forty miles from the city. Three machines--one English, one French (from Algiers), and one American--were the weapons of the contest. The audience was a crowd of curious witnesses gathered from every quarter of the globe. At a signal from the judges' stand the fine machines started and moved each over its allotted acre, cutting down and raking the grain like magic. The Algerian machine did its work in seventy-two minutes, the English in sixty-six, and the American in twenty-two minutes! A French journal at the time said of the American machine, "It did its work in the most exquisite manner, not leaving a single spear ungathered, and it discharged the grain in the most perfect shape, as if placed by hand for the binders. It finished its piece most gloriously." The contest was finally narrowed down to three reapers, all American, and the champion won its laurels amid the most deafening shouts of applause. SHRIMPS. Some one has said that he who first swallowed an oyster was a brave man, but many will agree that the one who first devoured a shrimp bodily was still braver. Not but that the shrimp may possess desirable nutritive qualities--may indeed be exceedingly palatable to those whose imaginations are proof against the sight of its jointed legs and arms and its ugly physiognomy. But in India, at least, where dead human bodies are often seen floating down the sacred Ganges literally covered with these crustaceans, the appetite for them must be sensibly affected. Many of Her Majesty's subjects there will never touch a shrimp after once witnessing this spectacle in the Ganges. The animal, however, may not be the common shrimp (_Crangon vulgaris_).