To the Editor of the "Norra-Cutna Dairy News."
'Sir,—I suppose that others besides' myself have found the difficulty, or indeed impossibility of finding houses by their numbers in this town. It is not so much the system of double numbering, European houses being one set of numbers and Chinese another, which makes long breaks in the sequence of the numbers so that No 6 may be half a mile from No 5, all the houses being Chinese between, as the frightfully promiscuous way the numbers are placed on the houses so that it is difficulty to know where to look for them and one often wonders if they have been taken upstairs. This can easily Te-medied and I suggest for the con sideration of the authorities that "Numbers of houses shall be of a uniform size (six inches) white, on a (12 inch) blue background, and that they shall be placed, suspended, in the centre of the doorway, or doorways, gateway or gateways, and/or all' and every other entrance way either private or public to every house whose number belongs to. the street or road at such a height as shall be convenient to traffic and so as to be in lines with and perpendicular to the inside of the public footpath or roadway which is the dividing line between the public roadway and adjoining land. Terraces with access by public or private road, adjoining, but not immediately on the main road to have their num-hers suspended over the centre of the means of access, in perpendicular line with the main street or road numberings and also ench houses to have their individual numbers on them as prescribed. Brackets for suspending the numbers to be of approved uniform pattern."
Also suggested that, in order to overcome the difficulty arising from the uneven spacing of the numbers under the dual _svstem, still another set of figures "be introduced which would be called the block numbers; thus a street is divided up "into blocks of a uniform length, say 200 feet and every house that comes within that block takes its secondary number from it. Thus a house might be six in the street but only two in the block, the block number' actually representing the distance from a given' point, or end of the street.
Lam, ete., Gusert E. Prev. Shanghai, Feb. 13.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.