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all Japanese towns. These new buildings are built with brick which has been coated with Portland cement plaster. The walls of the houses are of course perfectly uninflammable; and fireplaces with properly constructed chimneys are placed in each wall. These houses present no perfect immunity from fire, but there can be no doubt that from the use of uninflammable material in the walls, and by a well-devised system of construction they offer great checks to the spread of fire, and the danger of taking fire is immensely lessened. The buildings have evidently been designed so as to retain as far as possible the Japanese system of house with open fronts and moveable partitions; they are two storied and contain four small rooms, and have a small verandah in front supported on brick columns. They seem to be a very suitable species of building for the class of Japanese occupying them and they most certainly present an infinitely better example of building to the people than the European houses which I have just described.
The principal and most important move made by the Japanese Government towards introducing into this country a better appreciation of the art of building and, at the same time, furnishing the country with those results of the ingenuity and labours of our great engineers which have revolutionized the civilized world, is the establishment of the department of public works and the prosecution of the undertakings under its care. The construction of two lines of railway after the English model cannot fail to to instil into the minds of the many Japanese employed in connection with them, the advantages of the principles of building adopted in Europe. Although one of these lines does not unfortunately present many features worthy of imitation, the other one in the excellence of the details of the workmanship upon it, whether in brick, stone, or iron, snpplies a model of the greatest value. The lesson that these works afford the Japanese should be of the greatest use to them. The various natural products of their country have in them been moulded formed and brought into combination with each other so
