What with earthquakes, hurricanes and floods, the march of time, and rebuilding, the typical old-time planter’s houses are getting scarcer. Then, again, there are the monuments and gravestones which contribute to our knowledge of Jamaica genealogy and history. Captain Lawrence-Archer, in the middle of the last century, did much in his “Monumental Inscriptions of the British West Indies,” to put this information in a handy form, but his work, which is often inaccurate, by no means covers the whole field. Something of late years has been done in that direction by Mr. Oliver in “Caribbeana.” Although Jamaica is probably no worse than other countries in its disregard for ancient monuments, that there is need for improvement cannot be denied by those who have looked into the matter. The Spanish invaders burned the Arawâk huts; the old-time English planters despoiled Spanish buildings to find material for their sugar works; and in our own day a ruined seventeenth-century building which withstood the recent earthquake was later pulled down by peasants for the sake of its stones. When Lawrence-Archer wrote less than fifty years ago, he recorded a statue by Bacon to Richard Batty in the cathedral. Only a fragment of it remains to-day. The author of his epitaph little thought that the literal truth of part of it would be so early established when he wrote in 1796: “Yet vain the Record, which sculptured stone Would raise to those pre-eminently known.” The most strongly constructed building will wear out with time and, in the tropics especially, vegetation is apt to interfere with monuments and gravestones; but a little care without much expense should be all that is needed to render unnecessary an expensive restoration, which many individuals and bodies find themselves unprepared to meet and which, after all, can never take the place of preservation. In 1672 Port Royal contained 800 well-built houses, “as dear rented,” Blome tells us, “as if they stood in well-traded streets in London.” Twenty years later, when it was at its zenith, the number was 2000, “the greatest number of which were of brick, several storeys in height.” In 1692, as is well known, a large part of the town perished by an earthquake, and from that event Kingston dates its origin, Port Royal being partially destroyed again, by fire, in 1703 and by hurricane in 1722.