We are not aware that there are any wooden houses left in London.  There are other minor causes which act as checks upon the spreading of fires in London.  London houses are mostly small in size, and fires are thus confined to a limited space between brick walls.  Their walls are generally low and well braced, which enable the firemen to approach them without danger.  About 60 per cent. of London houses are less than 22 feet high from the pavement to the eaves; more than half of the remainder are less than 40 feet high, very few being over 50 feet high.  This, of course, excludes the newer buildings in the City.  St. James’s Palace does not exceed 40 feet, the Bank of England not over 30 feet in height; but these are exceptional structures.  Fireproof roofings and projecting party walls also retard the spreading of conflagrations.  The houses being comparatively low and small, the firemen are enabled to throw water easily over them, and to reach their roofs with short ladders.  There is in London an almost universal absence of wooden additions and outbuildings, and the New York ash barrel or box kept in the house is also unknown.  The local authorities in London keep a strict watch over the manufacture or storage of combustible materials in populous parts of the city.  Although overhead telegraph wires are multiplying to an alarming extent in London, their number is nothing to be compared to their bewildering multitude in New York, where their presence is not only a hinderance to the operations of the firemen, but a positive danger to their lives.  Finally—­and this has already been partly dealt with in speaking of the comparative density of population of the two cities—­a look at the map of London will show us how the River Thames and the numerous parks, squares, private grounds, wide streets, as well as the railways running into London, all act as effectual barriers to the extension of fires.

The recent great conflagrations in the city vividly illustrate to Londoners what fire could do if their metropolis were built on the New York plan.  The City, however, as we have remarked, is an exceptional part of London, and, taking the British metropolis as it is, with its hundreds of square miles of suburbs, and contrasting its condition with that of New York, we are led to adopt the opinion that London, with its excellent fire brigade, is safe from a destructive conflagration.  It was stated above, and it is repeated here, that the fire brigade of New York is unsurpassed for promptness, skill, and heroic intrepidity, but their task, by contrast, is a heavy one in a city like New York, with its numerous wooden buildings, wooden or asphalt roofs, buildings from four to ten stories high, with long unbraced walls, weakened by many large windows, containing more than ten times the timber an average London house does, and that very inflammable, owing to the dry and hot American climate.  But this is not all.  In New York we find the five and six story tenement houses with