INSTITUTIONS for the relief of orphans, half-orphans, the aged, sick, and blind, have greatly multiplied in New York during the last fifty years; yet a few observing minds discovered that there still existed a large and helpless class in the community, to whom no door of generous hospitality was open. Each Institution being established for the relief of a single class, always sufficiently numerous to tax it to its utmost, others, equally needy and worthy, were necessarily excluded. The asylum for the blind, and the one for the deaf-mute, received inmates at a certain age, but where were the poor homeless children to spend their earlier years? There were hospitals for sick and crippled children, as long as surgeons pronounced them curable, but incurables could not be admitted. Some institutions received half-orphans, or poor children, free, on condition that they were surrendered to the institution; but many parents, in pressing need of temporary relief, were unwilling to irrevocably surrender their children. The half-orphan asylum could not receive the children of the father deserted by his wife, of the wife abandoned by her husband, nor of parents who were both sick, in the hospital. These considerations led to the founding of the Sheltering Arms, an institution which proposed to extend the arm of relief and defence to multitudes not hitherto provided for. When the enterprise was first suggested, some regarded it as a useless undertaking, and suggested that it would be difficult to find children not hitherto, provided for, while others, more considerate, thought it too vast, if not quite Utopian. The society having been. organized, the President, Rev. Thos. M. Peters, D.D., generously offered his own house, situated at the corner of One Hundredth street and Broadway, free of rent for ten years, which was opened on the 6th of October, 1864, and forty children" all the building could accommodate, immediately received. The first child received in anticipation of opening the Institution, was a little deserted blind girl of four or five years, and soon after, a helpless crippled boy, unable to gain admittance into any hospital, because incurable, was received, and after seventeen months, flew away to that land where the inhabitants no more say, "I am sick." The operations of the first eighteen months proved two things. First, that their accommodations were inadequate to the demands made upon them; and secondly, that the generosity of the public-would support a larger family. In 1866, another building was erected by the trustees, at an expense of $10,000; the number of children increased to ninety, and the annual expenses of the Institution from $6,000 to $11,000. But a new difficulty soon confronted them. The Boulevard, in its wide sweep up the island, cut through their grounds, taking nine of their twenty-two lots, leaving the remainder in two pieces, and too small for their use. After examining several pieces of property, the trustees purchased an acre of ground, situated on One Hundred and Twenty-ninth street and Tenth avenue, in what is called Manhattanville. Their plan of building is partly modeled after the rough house of Wichern, near Hamburg, on the Horn, i.e., to erect cottages, so that the children may be divided into families of equal number; but the great value of ground on Manhattan has compelled them to unite several under one roof, instead of scattering them around the field as at Hamburg.