Besides these buildings two partially fire-proof publishing houses have been built; the Times Building and the Ledger Building; but there is nothing in either that it is pertinent to my inquiry to mention;—they are manufacturing buildings in the same sense that the Harper’s Building is, but the former might as well come within the class of office buildings. The fact of the American Bank Note Company having taken quarters in the Mutual Life Insurance Building, upon their expulsion from the Custom House, illustrates what my friend mentioned about the demand for buildings for delicate and elaborate processes, such as the art of bank note engraving, and goes to show that such branches of business are obliged to settle in buildings erected for other purposes. The work of a bank note company is in some respects a heavy manufacturing business, which any one will believe who examines the powerful boilers and engines in the cellar of the Mutual Insurance Building; but it is also a delicate artistic business, requiring steady floors, good light, and absolute safety from fire, to the valuable materials used and kept in it, which not money alone could replace. From the Bank Note Company we come next to the Assay office whose risks are similar. I am informed that it is absolutely fire-proof, but I have had no occasion to visit it. Of Banks and Insurance Buildings we certainly have a large number which are to all intents fire-proof, though but few are thoroughly so. It is generally admitted that such buildings are not in danger from their contents, and to this belief may be ascribed the fact that we already have so many of this class. The Continental Bank, the American Exchange Bank, the Mutual Life Insurance Company’s building, the Park Bank, and the City Bank building, recently remodeled, are absolutely fire-proof. Nothing less than a bonfire of all the furniture, books, and papers that could be collected together in any one room of any of these buildings would endanger its destruction. They are safe from any ordinary casualty. But in all the rest there is enough wood-work to make the word “fire-proof,” as applied to them, of very doubtful significance. To show what a practical eye the Insurance Companies have, let me say that in nearly all the so-called fire-proof bank buddings the rates of insurance are as high as in ordinary business buildings. The rates are unusually high in the building which I happen to occupy, on account of a well hole in the centre which is trimmed with wood, and would carry a fire through the whole building in an instant. What I might say in relation to buildings of this class will be comprised in some practical suggestions upon fire-proof buildings generally. Let us then look for a few moments into the matter of constructive details.