The importance of the subject which I propose for discussion is such that I need make no apology for bringing it under your notice. Fire, always a dreaded calamity, becomes complicated with many additional horrors when it breaks out in an asylum for the insane. The crowding under one roof of a mass of human beings, most of whom are incapable of acting for themselves, the locked doors, the secured windows, the often insufficient means of egress, are conditions which render a conflagration an exceptionally appalling calamity.