masters. The Boys' and Girls Hospital, lately built for 10,000, maintains and educates 50 boys and 50 girls. The Female Orphan Asylum, founded by Mrs Elmslie, in 1840, and managed by trustees, maintains and educates, chiefly as domestic servants, 46 girls between the ages of 4 and 16, at the yearly cost for each of about £23, 13s. Those admitted must be legitimate orphan daughters of respectable parents, who have lived three years immediately before death in Aberdeen or in the adjoining parishes of Old Machar and Nigg. The Hospital for Orphan and Female Destitute Children, endowed by John Carnegie and the trustees of the Murtle Fund, maintains and educates 50 girls, chiefly for domestic service. The Asylum for the Blind, established in 1843, on a foundation by Miss Cruickshank, maintains and educates about 10 blind children, and gives industrial employment to blind adults. There is a boys and girls school for 150 boys and 150 girls on Dr Bell's foundation. The Industrial Schools, begun by Sheriff Watson in 1841, and the Reformatory Schools, begun in 1857, having some 600 pupils on the roll, have greatly diminished juvenile crime in the district. The Murtle or John Gordon's Charitable Fund, founded in 1815, has an annual revenue from land of about £2400, applicable to all kinds of charity, in sums from £5 to £300. The Midbeltie Fund, founded by a bequest of £20,000, in 1848, by James Allan of Midboltie, gives yearly pensions ranging from £5 to £15 to respectable decayed widows in the parishes of St Nicholas and Old Machar.
The two parishes in which Aberdeen is situated, viz., St Nicholas and Old Machar, have each a large poor-house. The poor of both parishes cost about £20,000 a year. The Royal Infirmary, instituted in 1740, was rebuilt 1833-1840, in the Grecian style, at the cost of £17,000. It is a well-situated, large, commodious, and imposing building. It has three stories, the front being 166 feet long and 50 feet high, with a dome. A detached fever-house was built in 1872 for about £2500. The managers were incorporated by royal charter in 1773, and much increased in number in 1852. The institution is supported by land rents, feu-duties, legacies, donations, subscriptions, church collections, &c. Each bed has on an average 1200 cubic feet of space. There are on the average 130 resident patients, costing each on the average a shilling daily, and the number of patients treated may be stated at 1700 annually, besides outdoor patients receiving advice and medicine. The recent annual expenditure has been about £4300. There is a staff of a dozen medical officers.
The Royal Lunatic Asylum, opened in 1800, consists of two separate houses, valued in 1870 at £40,000, in an enclosure of 40 acres. It is under the same management as the Infirmary. The recent daily average of patients has been about 420, at an annual cost of £13,000. The annual rate for each pauper is £25, 10s. The General Dispensary, Vaccine, and Lying-in Institution, founded in 1823, has had as many as 6781 cases in one year. The Hospital for Incurables has a daily average of 26 patients, and the Ophthalmic and Auric Institution has had 671 cases in a year.
The Music Hall, built in 1821 and 1859 at the cost of £16,500, has a front 90 feet long, with a portico of 6 Ionic pillars 30 feet high; large, highly-decorated lobbies and zooms; and a hall 150 feet long, 68 broad, and 50 high, with a flat ceiling, and galleries. The hall holds 2000 persons seated, and has a fine organ and an orchestra for 300. Here H.R.H. Prince Albert opened the British Association, as president, 14th September 1859. A new Theatre and Opera House was built in 1872, in the mixed Gothic style, for £8400, with the stage 52 feet by 29, and the auditorium for 1700 to 1800 persons. The front wall is of bluish granite and red and yellow freestone, with some polished Peterhead granite pillars, the rest being built of concrete.
In Castle Street, the City Place and Old Market Stance, is the Market Cross, a beautiful, open-arched, hexagonal structure of freestone, 21 feet diameter, and 18 feet high. It has Ionic columns and pilasters, and an entablature of twelve panels. On ten of the panels are medallions, cut in stone, in high relief, of the Scottish sovereigns from James I. to James VII. From the centre rises a composite column 1212 feet high, with a Corinthian capital, on which is the royal unicorn rampant. This cross was planned and erected about 1682 by John Montgomery, a native architect, for £100 sterling. On the north side of the same street, adjoining the municipal buildings, is the North of Scotland Bank, a Grecian building in granite, with a portico of Corinthian columns, having most elaborately carved capitals. On an eminence east of Castle Street are the military barracks for 600 men, built in 1796 for £16,000.
The principal statues in the city are those of the last Duke of Gordon—died 1836—in grey granite, 10 feet high; Queen Victoria, in white Sicilian marble, 812 feet high; Prince Albert, bronze, natural-size, sitting posture; and a curious rough stone figure, of unknown date, supposed to be Sir William Wallace.
The Dee to the south of the city is crossed by three bridges, the old bridge of Dee, an iron suspension bridge, and the Caledonian Railway bridge. The first, till 1832 the only access to the city from the south, consists of seven semicircular ribbed arches, is about 30 feet high, and was built early in the 16th century by Bishops Elphinstone and Dunbar. It was nearly all rebuilt 1718-1723, and from being 1412 feet wide, it was in 1842 made 26 feet wide. From Castle Street, King Street leads in the direction of the new bridge of Don (a little east of the old "Brig o' Balgownie"), of five granite arches, each 75 feet span, built for nearly £13,000 in 1827-1832.
A defective harbour, and a shallow sand and gravel bar at its entrance, long retarded the trade of Aberdeen, but, under various Acts since 1773, they have been greatly deepened. The north pier, built partly by Smeaton, 1775-1781, and partly by Telford, 1810-1815, extends 2000 feet into the German Ocean. It is 30 feet broad, and, with the parapet, rises 15 feet above high water. It consists of large granite blocks. It has increased the depth of water on the bar from a few feet to 22 or 24 feet at spring tides, and to 17 or 18 feet at neap. The wet dock, of 29 acres, and with 6000 feet of quay, was completed in 1848, and called Victoria Dock, in honour of Her Majesty's visit to the city in that year. These and other improvements of the harbour and its entrance cost £325,000 down to 1848. By the Harbour Act of 1868, the Dee near the harbour has been diverted to the south, ac the cost of £80,000, and 90 acres of new ground (in addition to 25 acres formerly made up) for harbour works are being made up on the city or north side of the river; £80,000 has been laid out in forming in the sea, at the south side of the river, a new breakwater of concrete, 1050 feet long, against south and south-east storms. The navigation channel is being widened and deepened, and the old pier or break water on the north side of the river mouth is to be lengthened at least 500 feet seaward. A body of 31 commissioners manage the harbour affairs.
Aberdeen Bay affords safe anchorage with off-shore winds, but not with those from the N.E., E., and S.E. On the Girdleness, the south point of the bay, a lighthouse was built in 1833, in lat. 57° 8' N., and long. 2° 3' W., with two fixed lights, one vertically below the other, and respectively 115 and 185 feet above mean tide. There are also fixed leading lights to direct ships entering the harbour
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