"There is no one circumstance in the history of the manufacturing enterprise of the English nation which places in so strong a light as this its boundless resources in materials, to say nothing of the arithmetical skill in computing at what cost and in how short a time those materials could be converted to a special purpose. What was done in those few days? Two parties in London, relying on the accuracy and good faith of certain iron-masters, glass-workers in the provinces, and of one master-carpenter in London, bound themselves for a certain sum of money, and in the course of some four months, to cover eighteen acres of ground with a building upwards of a third of a mile long, and some four hundred and fifty feet broad. In order to do this, the glass-maker promised to supply, in the required time, nine hundred thousand square feet of glass (weighing more than four hundred tons), in separate panes, and these the largest that ever were made of sheet glass; each being forty-nine inches long. The iron-master passed his word in like manner to cast in due time three thousand three hundred iron columns, varying from fourteen feet and a half to twenty feet in length: thirty-four miles of guttering-tube, to join every individual column together under the ground; two thousand two hundred and twenty-four girders (but some of these are of wrought iron); besides eleven hundred and twenty-eight bearers for supporting galleries. The carpenter undertook to get ready within the specified period two hundred and five MILES of sash-bar, flooring for an area of thirty-three millions of cubic feet, besides enormous quantities of wooden walling, louvre-work, and partition.[3] "It is not till we reflect on the vast sums of money involved in transactions of this magnitude that we can form even a slight notion of the great, almost ruinous loss, a trifling arithmetical error would have occasioned, and of the boundless confidence the parties must have had in their resources and in the correctness of their computations. Nevertheless, it was one great merit in Mr. Paxton's original details of measurement that they were contrived to facilitate calculation. "There was little time for consideration, or for setting right a single mistake, were it ever so disastrous. On the prescribed day the tender was presented, with whatever imperfections it might have had, duly and irredeemably sealed. But after-checkings have divulged no material error." The Royal Commission appear from the first to have been favourably impressed with Mr. Paxton's design, partly, no doubt, because its adoption would at once silence the great bricks-and-mortar objection to the occupation of the site in Hyde Park; and the result was that, on the 16th of July, Messrs. Fox and Henderson's tender of 79,800_l._ for Mr. Paxton's design was verbally accepted, and, as soon as the necessary arrangements could be made, the contract was formally concluded. History of Mr. Paxton's Design.