One of the tables, however, furnishes a grave disappointment. It is an innocent-looking suspension bridge, the middle third of which is supported by a series of piles and the floor roofed in with canes and palm-leaves. It is a model of a bridge over the Boitang Toro, and one expects to find it of the ratan which is of general use and grows two hundred and fifty feet long; but no: it is of telegraph wire! So much for the intrusion of modern devices when one is revelling in one of the most interesting ethnological exhibits ever gathered. We have, however, but to turn round to be consoled. Here is the roller cotton-gin, which was doubtless used in India before the conquests of Alexander. Then we have the spinning-wheel, which differs in no important respect from that of England in the thirteenth century, and is similar to, but ruder than, that used by our great-grandmothers, when "spinster" meant something, and a girl brought to the home of her choice a goodly array of linen. This was before cotton was king, and before factories were known either for cotton, flax or wool. Was it a better day than the present, or no? Things work round, and the roller-gin is now the better machine, having in the most perfected processes supplanted the saw-gin. This may be news to some, but will be admitted by those who have examined what the present Exposition has to show. Here also is the bow for bowing the cotton, the original cotton-opener and cleaner. We cannot, either, omit the reeling mechanism for the thread nor the looms of simple construction, which can by no means cost over a couple of dollars and yet make fine check stuffs, good cotton ginghams. Perhaps we might allow another dollar for the reed with its six hundred dents of split ratan. [Illustration: TROPHY IN THE COURT OF THE DUTCH INDIES.] Curious and bizarre chintzes are shown in connection with the machinery, and some doubtless made by the processes described by Pliny eighteen hundred years ago. Other calicoes are made by at least two processes which are comparatively modern in England, but certainly two thousand years old in Asia. One is the direct application of a dye-charged stamp upon the goods. Another is known by us as the _resist_ process, and consists in printing with a material which will exclude the dye; then putting the goods in the dye-tub; subsequently washing out the resist-paste, when the stamped pattern shows white on a colored ground. Some of the pieces of calico make me suspect the _discharge_ process also, in which a piece of goods, having been dyed, is stamped in patterns with a material which has the faculty of making the dye fugitive, when washing causes the pattern to appear white on a colored ground.