Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 74.djvu/111

Rh with life, showing the latent force which is impelling us on to the magnificent destiny prepared for our country by a Divine Providence."

The background, with Rio's wonderful hills, and the foreground, with Rio's magnificent bay, combine here to make a natural setting which it is safe to say no national or international exposition has ever had. No artificial lakes and canals, picturesque as these may be; no magnificent buildings; no marvels of electric lighting; no fountains or cascades—none of the things that have made other expositions famous, can compare with what nature herself has done in giving Rio de Janeiro this splendid harbor and these mountains, here green and soft, there grim and bare, with the famous "Sugar Loaf" guarding the

entrance to the harbor on one side of the exposition grounds, and the precipitous Corcovado, towering up like a sentinel above the city, on the other. To readers who do not know Rio de Janeiro, the words of the opening address, in which the beauties of the city were enthusiastically described, will seem like undue exaggeration. The speaker said:

The most beautiful city in South America, where the deep sea and the laughing bays; the high and solemn peaks; the gently-sloping hills; the rows of houses bathed in sunshine or showing, less distinctly, in the lights of the rosary of diamonds which surrounds the shores, fantastically mirrored in the waters of the bay—these combine to give a picture which is wholly unique in