How are we to reconcile this increase with the extraordinary efficiency of the Fire Brigade, and the improvements in measures of precaution? Partly by the regular increase in the numbers of houses. But Mr. Braidwood frankly declares that this does not meet the increase of fires and alarms of fire that reach the Office. We can only account for it, therefore, by the great increase of scientific combustibles, not merely in our shops, but in our domestic arrangements—especially gas, and lucifer-matches—and yet more to the fact that, in former years, many slight fires caused no alarm to be given, while now the arrangements are so complete, that probably almost every slight alarm of fire that occurs is carried to the Office, and duly recorded. With respect to Fire-Escapes; precautions against fire, that should be adopted in houses; arrangements to meet the accident; and the best means of extinguishing fires (particularly with reference to Mr. Phillips’ Fire-Annihilator, which possesses an undoubted power over _flames_), we cannot now afford the space their importance merits; but we shall bear them in mind for a future number. POETRY IN THE BYE-WAYS. Every book-hunter, whose connection with paper and print has more of individuality than of fashion in it—must in his time have met with scores of small volumes of rhyme forced out with a care and pains of which the heart aches to think, prefaced with the bad taste of immoderate deprecation on the part of the author,—or with the worse appeal of extravagant commendation on the part of the patron—none of which shall merit a place on the shelf by the side of Crabbe, or Wordsworth, or Burns—none of which can be denied the possession of some sparks and breathings of true poetry. Sometimes, however, it must be owned, that the difficulties under which the rhymester has laboured, are the best—nay the sole—evidences of his genius. In the verses of Phillis Wheatly, the negro girl, for instance, there is not a line that is not the stalest of the stale—not an image that is not the most second-hand of the second-hand. Yet, that sixty years since, a woman of her condemned colour and oppressed race—in America, too,—should find spirits to sing, and power to attract an audience,—in that fact was a poem of no common order.