Written reports are drawn up by these selected examiners and signed by the authors.  The reports must be “based upon inherent and comparative merit.  The elements of merit shall be held to include considerations relating to originality, invention, discovery, utility, quality, skill, workmanship, fitness for the purpose intended, adaptation to public wants, economy and cost.”  Each report, upon its completion, is delivered to the Centennial Commission for award and publication.  The award comes in the shape of a diploma with a bronze medal and a special report of the judges upon its subject.  This report may be published by the exhibitor if he choose.  It will also be used by the Commission in such manner as may best promote the objects of the exposition.  These documents, well edited and put in popular form, will constitute the most valuable publication that has been produced by any international exhibition.  To this we may add the special reports to be made by the State and foreign commissions.  These ought, with the light gained by time, to be at least not inferior to the similar papers scattered through the bulky records of previous exhibitions.  Let us hope that brevity will rule in the style of all the reports, regular and irregular.  There is a core to every subject, every group of subjects and every group of groups, however numerous and complex:  let all the scribes labor to find it for us.  When we recall the disposition of all committees to select the member most fecund of words to prepare their report, we are seized with misgivings—­a feeling that becomes oppressive as we further reflect that the local committee which deliberately collected and sent for exhibition eighty thousand manuscripts written by the school-children of a Western city is at large on the exposition grounds.

The passion for independent effort characteristic of the American people led to the supplementing of the official list by sundry volunteer prizes.  These are offered by associations, and in some cases individuals.  They are not all, like the regular awards, purely honorary.  They lean to the pecuniary form, those particularly which are offered in different branches of agriculture.  Competition among poultry-growers, manufacturers of butter, reaping-and threshing-machines, cotton-planters, etc. is stimulated by money-prizes reaching in all some six or eight thousand dollars.  Agricultural machinery needs the open field for its proper testing, and cannot operate satisfactorily in Machinery Hall.  Without a sight of our harvest-fields and threshing-floors foreigners would carry away an incomplete impression of our industrial methods, the farm being our great factory.  The oar, the rifle and the racer are as impatient of walls as the plough and its new-fangled allies.  They demand elbow-room for the display of their powers, and the Commission was fain to let their votaries tempt it to pass the confines of its territory.  The lusty undergraduates