The institutions of a nation may be inferred from its buildings much more certainly than a man's character from the bumps on his cranium. Castles on hill-tops, huts in the open fields, a few grand churches and walled towns, imply a society composed of lords, vassals, an influential priesthood, and insecure artisans and traders. Provincial towns of mean buildings, in a country whose capital is beautified with monuments, palaces and public gardens, indicate a centralised despotism. The solitary temple, the clumps of small dwellings, opening into a common garden, represent fairly the theocratical government and polygamy of the Saints of Utah; while State capitals, county buildings, separate dwellings and numerous small churches, are the natural products of our States-Rights Federation, local legislation, family institution, division into sects and religious toleration. Political philosophers have reconstructed the government and social condition of Herculaneum from its houses and furniture, as well as Cuvier did the mastodon from a single bone.

Architecture marches abreast with education,science, arts, wealth, taste and political freedom. If one advances, all advance. We excel the last generation in public schools, learned bodies, painting, sculpture and music; we are richer, demand a higher standard of comfort, and do not whip Quakers, drown witches, or disfranchise Catholics. Owing to the same general causes, we build better houses. Compare those of modern erection in our city with those pulled down to make way for them. Our hotels are more spacious, churches more imposing, stores more elegant, and dwellings more convenient. In these last, the superiority is particularly striking. Chemical science has sent to the buyer of findings and old iron the grease-dropping, expensive and dangerous lamp, and given us the neat, cheap and safe gas-burner. Physiological science has settled the point, that cleanliness is the best preservative of health, and good dwellings are provided with bath houses. The invention of improved furnaces is gradually doing away with fire-places, grates, stoves, and their suite of coal-scuttles, pokers and "helps." Dumb-waiters, speaking-tubes and bells contribute their share to the increasing convenience of domestic life. Ventilation is better provided for; a child may lower or throw up a sash.

The ceilings, too, are higher, the stair flights are not so steep, and there is a decided effort at a better style of exterior ornamentation.

These improvements, however, are confined, for the most part, to the dwellings of persons in easy circumstances. Under the present system of extravagance, credit, and no homestead-exemption, the poor are tenants - and landlords build houses with reference to the percentage of probable profits, and not to the convenience, health, or economy of living of the occupants. Mean dwellings yield the highest rents in proportion to their cost. Hence they abound. Their walls are thin as the lips of Avarice. How tenderly the mason treats them until the joists are laid, which he hopes will hold them up I How carefully the carpenter draws up his beams-and rafters ! he fears to dash the shell of the frail structure. How happy are both to finish up and have the bills settled before the walls settle and crack! The tenant moves in. Luckless man I he is an unwilling witness to the family affairs of his neighbor, on either side of him. He hears all the loud tones, noisy children, squeaking beds, and creaking shoes. If he could spare money, he would present each of them with a carpet. He is afraid the walls are not solid, for they crack at the partitions, and over the windows. He would fear to invite many friends into the upper story.

Foreigners find our family circles dull: they would have more dancing and lively games. But, we ask, is this reasonable, when a Polka Redowa makes the house shake, and an old-fashioned contra dance might land the whole family in the streets, under an indefinite quantity of shivered household gods, lath and plaster, and roof-timbers ? There is not one tenant house in five that stands two years without cracked walls. In conflagrations, they come crashing down, as soon as joists and rafters are burnt through; sometimes sooner. How many valuable lives have been lost in our city owing to this cause! As we write, the loved and honored dead pass in solemn review before our mind's eye. The hands we pressed, and the forms we admired, were crushed under the smouldering masses of brick and mortar. We have aided in digging their disfigured remains from heaps of rubbish. Why should our laws give the right to set man traps on every lot? Our style of building is fairly open to the charge of monotony. The German emigrant as he leaves Antwerp or Havre, takes a lingering look at their slated roofs meeting at every angle, shooting up into pinnacles, or sloping to the lower story, their steep sides relieved by dormer windows - at their irregular buildings, with the lights and shadows playing about their angles - the arched gateways - the niched and sculptured facades, with their mullioned windows, arched at every angle, trefoil, eliptioal, round or oblong, in rich variety, and running up into gable ends or turrets, as the taste of the architect may have dictated.

He will not see such a sight when he lands at New York, nor when he reaches Philadelphia. View Market street, from the Schuylkill Bridge, and each side looks like a block of buildings, its straght top line broken only by the rising at intervals of an additional story. All the houses are oblong squares; the visible section of each roof is of the same shape; each presents the same dripping eave; doors, windows, sills and shutters are all square. They are almost as uniform as a row of bricks set up on end. We say "almost," for there are a few, of recent construction, upon which the eye reposes with pleasure. These owe their attractiveness to the variety of form exhibited in windows, doors and front, and to the relief of the facade, by columns and other ornamentation. The streets devoted to private residences are scarcely more varied. There is an endless repetition of the square window, door and front, and the "three-story front and two-story back." Unless you know a street well, it is ten to one that you mistake it for another. There are whole blocks in which the houses resemble each other as closely as pigeon holes.

A tenant of one shall enter another, hang up his hat, make himself at home in the parlor, ring for tea, scold the hired girl, and not discover his mistake until he asks why his wife don't come to kiss him.

Philadelphia genius has not exhausted itself in the invention of the square window and the "three-story front and two-story back." Something better is in store for the generation growing up, who have studied the arts of design better than their fathers. We cherish hopes of living to see somebody bold enough to build a house unlike others on the same street - anything to break this wearisome iteration of the square, even were it a Chinese pagoda for a tea-store, or a Swiss cottage for an ice-cream saloon. Who can tell but that, before many years, we shall see a Gothic arch here and there, or a projecting window, or a few steep roofs, or a gable end or two turned to the street, or the sunken entry, sheltering the visiter from the rain or sun, while he waits for a tardy "help" to answer the bell. Stained glass may be introduced. There are even now among us, in West Philadelphia and on School house lane persons who appreciate that promise in Hol writ: " Behold! I will lay thy stones with fair colors, and thy foundation with sapphires; and I will make thy windows agates, and thy gates with carbuncles, and all thy borders with pleasant stones".

We recommend this whole matter to the Academy of Fine Arts. A painting on the Academy walls pleases the few who will pay twenty-five cents to see it A beautiful building or window gratifies thousands gratis. Architecture has, too, the advantage of a wide range. Painting and sculpture are imitative arts, limited by the outlines of the objects they represent. Architecture is limited by nothing but the laws of matter and the inventive genius of man. It is capable of inexhaustible variety.

[The foregoing we clip from the Public Ledger as worthy of preservation in our columns. It is not often that more just sentiments on the subject discussed, are condensed within the same space. - Ed].