The ground immediately round the Museum, on the average of its three sides, is valued in the Report of the Special Committee of Trustees (twenty-sixth November, 1859), at about forty-three thousand five hundred pounds per acre. [Sidenote: EXPENSE OF GROUND.] The houses in Charlotte Street are inferior in character to those on the other two sides, and might doubtless be purchased at a proportionately less price; but the writer, being anxious to err only on the safe side, assumes the average price as necessary. The ground proposed to be taken is about four hundred and fifty feet long, by a breadth generally of one hundred and fifty feet, but at the south end not exceeding one hundred and ten feet; so that the total area is about sixty-four thousand seven hundred square feet, or somewhat less than an acre and a half. The price, therefore, may be set down at sixty-five thousand pounds. Buildings are estimated in the same report to cost about two pounds per square foot, reckoned upon the total internal area of the principal floors, without the basement. This calculation is founded on buildings consisting of a basement, a ground floor, and one upper floor. [Sidenote: OF BUILDINGS.] The buildings proposed by the writer are in one respect more costly than these, as their basements bear a larger proportion to those floors on which the cost is calculated. But in two other respects they are more economical:—1. Because they include, in one part, a second floor, which swells the space from which the expense is calculated, without involving any addition to the basement. 2. Because some of the galleries on the ground floor are not really separate buildings, but parts of a single block of buildings, subdivided merely by partition walls. On the whole, therefore, the estimate of two pounds per foot seems the safest basis of calculation. Now the quantity of internal area or floor space in the proposed new buildings is— ┌────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │For the collections 71,760 square feet.│ │For studies, staircases, &c. 8,600 „ │ │ ______ │ │Total 80,360 „ │ └────────────────────────────────────────────────┘