1. The main defect is due to the fact that the cubic capacity of the house is far too great for the area upon which it is built. The house is, in fact, a tower of five storeys, 60 feet high from basement to roof, and containing 37,000 cubic feet, standing on an area of 1,512 square feet. A house of this shape entails enormous labour upon servants. It has been said, that in raising the body vertically we do an amount of work equal to moving the body twenty times the distance horizontally. The climb from basement to the top storey is therefore equal to walking 1,000 or 1,200 feet along the level, and when a footman weighing 11 stone, and carrying 28 pounds weight of coals, climbs from the coal-cellar to one of the top rooms, the work done is rather more than _four foot-tons_. I do not know when high-service water supplies became general in London houses, but it is evident that when the only water-supply was in the basement, the inconvenience of these high houses must have been very great. Gas-pipes, hydraulic lifts, electric wires, speaking-tubes, and high water supply have so lessened the personal service required in these domestic towers, that they have become popular, and by increasing the overcrowding in our cities they now constitute a very serious sanitary danger. In America the houses with steel frames have been run up to a height of 250 feet and over, and have converted the streets into sunless, draughty cañons, in which locomotion is a matter of great difficulty, because the width of the street bears no due proportion to the cubic contents (and population) of the houses flanking it. 2. The house being flanked on either side by other houses, the front and back walls are alone available for admitting light and air, and the depth of the house is unduly great in proportion to its width. The noise of the neighbours is not always a trivial drawback. 3. One storey, and the largest, is below the street level, an arrangement which, from a sanitary point of view, is unjustifiable, and ought never to be imitated in the country. 4. There is no back door, which is a very serious defect in a house. The result is that the coals have to be got in, and the ashes and garbage to be got out, under the dining-room windows, and that while these tedious processes are in doing the traffic in the main street is very much impeded. It is said that eels get used to skinning, and so the Londoner becomes very blind to the failings of the house which he inhabits. The house of which the plan and sections are shown in the figures is not, be it observed, one of the dwellings of the poor, of which we hear so much, but one of the dwellings of the well-to-do, or even rich, fetching probably 350_l._ a year rent. It would need four servants, one of whom would sleep below ground level in the pantry; and in addition to the servants, eight persons might squeeze into such a house.