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will also require stabling and coach-houses. These are very very much ruder than our own, but must be spacious. Special attention must be paid to the great value of one aspect as compared with another—the breezy and the shady side of a building are preferable to the other aspects in a very great degree, but the difficulty of securing a good aspect for as many rooms as possible in a building being not unknown in England, I will not enlarge upon it. Wherever practicable, an Indian building is placed within an ample walled enclosure, called a compound, which is a kind of comprise between a meadow, an orchard, and a garden ; and in this compound, when a number of attendants are required, nestles a cluster of huts where they and their families live, and other huts, such as the cook-house, where the household work is mainly done. In city buildings it is usual to give up the whole or some part of the ground floor to the servants, though in some buildings lately erected in the city of Bombay, they, and the kitchen (called cook room), have been provided for in the topmost story. The number of attendants required is very great. Asa rule in all tropical countries native labour is cheap and plentiful; each individual does not do much, and the subdivision of labour is carried out to a perplexing extent. It is worth taking a good deal of trouble to arrange the stables and these servants’ dwellings, so that they shall not come to the windward of the building they belong to,—that is, if the prevalent direction of the wind is known. Various bad odours are likely to arise there, and even the fuel burned in cooking in these places, being cakes of dried cow-dung, gives forth an unpleasant smell, and this or any other bad smell is peculiarly offensive in a hot climate. Having now said something upon the arrangements and features desirable in a building intended fora tropical climate, we are next to consider some other peculiarities which may have to be provided for in preparing to execute such a building. The difficulties attendant upon the actual carrying out of any building in a tropical country are often serious. They are of two classes; those of a structural nalure,—as difficultiesrelative to materials, to labour, to modes of working, &c, and those of what may be termed an administrative nature, that is to say, those affected by the peculiarity of arrangements, or want of arrangements, for getting building work done. It is not sufficient to prepare plans for a building, which would be a good looking and suitable one if it were built. It is also necessary that the plans and arrangements should be fitted as nearly as possible to the material and moral circumstances of the case. This necessity is too often overlooked, ignored, or at best inadequately met, and in consequence works well designed in this country have often been ill-carried out, abandoned or modified in a destructive sense abroad. There may be many things that would prove good if done, which yet cannot be done, and others which could be done, but which people cannot be got to do. The structural difficulties mainly to be anticipated can be, I thiuk, summed up in one word—want of appliances. There is in India, at least, no want of hands. Labour is plentiful and cheap there, and a surprising degree of some sorts of skill still exists in plenty also, and this is probably more or less true of every place within the tropics, where buildings of importance are likely to be needed by Europeans; but any appliances beyond the rudest for raising weights, putting materials in their place, fitting together unwiedly portions of a structure, or even building a scaffold or hoisting a block of stone, may be expected to be scarce. In a peculiarly un-English method many sorts of works are well carried on by the natives, who seem to retain, along with the ruder ways of common building, some lingering traditions of arts long almost discussed in the cities chiefly occupied by Europeans. A building in progress, is, however, a curiously uncouth sight to unaccustomed European eyes. The scaffolding, so irregular and insecure in its appearance, seems only fitted to fall, yet it does its work : vast crowds of half-naked work-people—those carrying burdens being mostly women—each bearing on her head a light load of what has to be transported; the mason squatting on the stone he has to dress, holding his chissel in the tips of his fingers, and dealing dainty taps with a small hammer, as though he were a sculptor finishing off a marble statue; thesmith squatting over his fire, as though his feet must be among the sparks and cinders as well as his iron ; and among them all the dusky overseer with long white robes, and perhaps an enormous red turban, perhaps a tall glazed cap, and on his brow bearing the distinctive mark of his favourite idol, advances with the most obsequious of bows, his posture intended to convey the idea of an entire devotion to your service—not always carried out by his conduct. On such a work as this, busy and active though it be, an iron bolt or a cramp or a joggle, not to mention a powerful crane or a crab, which here it would be the simplest possible thing to have, would be something of a difficulty even in such a city as Bombay; elsewhere it might prove a formidable undertaking, perhaps even an impossibility. Nor is sending things over from this country always a safe and complete resource, although it has to be largely practised. Every one knows how often when such things as iron-work, metal fittings, &e., are sent on to a building at home, there is something wrong. Bolts going somewhere where a spanner cannot be got to turn the nuts, things that refuse to match or to fit their place, are serious hindrances even here; but when the original foundry is four thousand miles off, so that either a clumsy makeshift made on the spot has to be adopted, or a delay of six months has to be endured before a casting sent in error or broken in transit can be replaced, it is obvious that every complicated appliance ought to be avoided where possible; and where not, that everything of the sort should be put together in this country completely before shipping, and that duplicates of every thing liable to damage or loss ought to be provided in abundance. In reference to breakage I may, bye the bye, remark that more of it occurs in landing than on the voyage. Castings will travel excellently well if stowed along with plenty of small coal, but their disembarkation should be specially superintended. The necessity of hoisting a large weight or fixing a difficult piece of masonry may prove an insurmountable obstacle; and the employment of anything that would be con sidered even moderately difficult in this country ought to be avoided, unless the architect have previously ascertained that the means of carrying out his intentions exist at the locality where his building is to stand, as in part they do in the larger cities and most active colonies. In short, in designing for the tropics the architect should suppose that his work is going to be carried out much as mediaeval work was done, and without any modern appliances whatever ; and how lightly such a limi tation need sit on a true artist may be easily understood by re collecting how grand and how perfect were the buildings which our predecessors erected in an age when steam cranes, travellers, and railways were unknown, before iron had been introduced into buildings, and when roads were bad, and hoisting little understood. The materials obtainable in any tropical locality will be sure to differ somewhat from those at home. As a specimen I will give an account of what is obtainable in Bombay; and here let me say that Bombay must be taken as on the whole a very favourable specimen of an Indian city. It is the capital of Western India,—fast becoming the greatest commercial em porium of India, is a city of great wealth, possesses a popula tion of about a million, rapidly increasing, and has one of the finest harbours in the world ; whatever therefore is wanting in Bombay will not be likely to be better supplied elsewhere. This island is volcanic, and no stratified stone seems pro curable there or for many miles round. The ordinary building stone is a very hard rough slate-coloured basaltic trap, quarried with difficulty, all having to be blasted, chiefly used in stones of small size as rubble, laid with plenty of mortar, and plas tered externally. It will make good but rough rubble work if squarred up, but much of it proves to be perishable when placed in a building. For dressings and asnlar there is a scanty supply of one or two varieties of yellowish trap stone, called Coorla stone, of a hard unyielding nature, very difficult to procure in large blocks. A brownish granular limestone, closely resembling the worst qualities of Bath stone, and known as Porebundei’ stone, is imported by sea from the coasts of Kattiwar, a distance of some 300 miles. This is the best available material for mason’s work in dressings or architec tural features, but it is liable to discolour after being some years in a building; it is often defective, and it is so costly that on any large work it would probably be a saving to im port Bath or Caen stone from Europe. Native bricks are very dear and small, being thin, like Roman bricks; they are mostly defective, but are available for internal use; bricks of English pattern are brought to Bombay some thirty miles, from Callian,