umbers; they are filling a long
needed place; they are at present rendering great service to mankind;
and they are destined to cover a field of still greater usefulness.
Reinforced concrete will undoubtedly show in the future that the
confidence which most engineers and others now place in it is fully
merited.

HARRY F. PORTER, JUN. AM. SOC. C. E. (by letter).--Mr. Godfrey has
brought forward some interesting and pertinent points, which, in the
main, are well taken; but, in his zealousness, he has fallen into the
error of overpersuading himself of the gravity of some of the points he
would make; on the other hand, he fails to go deeply enough into others,
and some fallacies he leaves untouched. Incidentally, he seems somewhat
unfair to the Profession in general, in which many earnest, able men are
at work on this problem, men who are not mere theorists, but have been
reared in the hard school of practical experience, where refinements of
theory count for little, but common sense in design counts for much--not
to mention those self-sacrificing devotees to the advancement of the
art, the collegiate and laboratory investigators.

Engineers will all agree with Mr. Godfrey that there is much in the
average current practice that is erroneous, much in textbooks that is
misleading if not fallacious, and that there are still many designers
who are unable to think in terms of the new material apart from the
vestures of timber and structural steel, and whose designs, therefore,
are cumbersome and impractical. The writer, however, cannot agree with
the author that the practice is as radically wrong as he seems to think.
Nor is he entirely in accord with Mr. Godfrey in his "constructive
criticism" of those practices in which he concurs, that they are
erroneous.

That Mr. Godfrey can see no use in vertical stirrups or U-bars is
surprising in a practical engineer. One is prompted to ask: "Can the
holder of this opinion ever have gone through the experience of placing
steel in a job, or at least have watched the operation?" If so, he must
have found some use for those little members which he professes to
ignore utterly.

As a matter of fact, U-bars perform the following very useful and
indispensable services:

(_1_).--If properly made and placed, they serve as a saddle in which to
rest the horizontal steel, thereby insuring the correct placing of the
latter during the operation of concreting, not a mean function in a type
of c