There comes an end to all temporal things and a winter's morning a full decade ago saw the historic opera house go up in a truly theatrical puff of smoke and flame. And it was said that day that Brooklyn had lost an institution by which it was as well known as the Navy Yard or Plymouth church--where Beecher had once thundered. Before the ruins in Montague street were cool there were demands that the Academy be rebuilt. Brooklynites even then were beginning to feel that the old Brooklyn was beginning to pass. Beecher was dead; the last of Talmage's Tabernacles was burned and was not to be rebuilt. The idea of becoming a second Harlem was appalling. The rebuilding of the Academy was a popular measure, a test as to Brooklyn's ability to preserve at least a vestige of civic unity unto herself. It was a hard test and it almost failed. There was a time when it seemed as if Brooklyn must give up and become the Cinderella of all the boroughs of the new New York. But it seems that there were other institutions in Brooklyn and not the least of these was, and still is, the Institute of Arts and Sciences. This is a sort of civic Chautauqua. Toward it several thousand men and women each pay five dollars a year for the opportunity to gain culture and entertainment at the same time. They have lectures, museums, picture-shows, recitals and the like and this institute has so fat a purse that the impresario or prima donna is yet to be found who is strong enough to withstand its pleadings. This institute came valiantly to the aid of the Academy project and saved the day. While it has no proprietary interest in the new structure, it is its chief tenant, and the new Academy was planned in detail to meet the needs of this popular educational institution. So, while the old Academy had a single auditorium, the new has a half-dozen big and comfortable meeting-places. On a single night Brooklyn can snap its fingers at the Metropolitan Opera House, over across the East river, and can gather within its own Temple of Song--a spacious and elegant theater which receives the Metropolitan company once a week during the season--can place another great audience in the adjoining Music Hall, with its well-renowned pipe-organ; in still another hall hear some traveler show his pretty pictures and tell of distant climes and strange peoples; in a lofty ballroom, hold formal reception and dance; and gather in a still smaller hall to hear Professor Something-or-other discuss the geological strata of Iceland or the like. In this way, several audiences, all bent on divers purposes, can be assembled in this big and passing handsome structure and yet be completely independent of each other. The new Brooklyn Academy, wrought after a hard fight, is no tiny toy.