takes the shear, it must give it back to
the concrete beam from the point of its full usefulness to the support.
Mr. Thacher would not say of a steel truss that the diagonal bars would
take the shear, if these bars, in a deck truss, were attached to the top
chord several feet away from the support, or if the end connection were
good for only a fraction of the stress in the bars. Why does he not
apply the same logic to reinforced concrete design?

Answering the third point, Mr. Thacher makes more statements that are
characteristic of current logic in reinforced concrete literature, which
does not bother with premises. He says, "In a beam, the shear rods run
through the compression parts of the concrete and have sufficient
anchorage." If the rods have sufficient anchorage, what is the nature of
that anchorage? It ought to be possible to analyze it, and it is due to
the seeker after truth to produce some sort of analysis. What mysterious
thing is there to anchor these rods? The writer has shown by analysis
that they are not anchored sufficiently. In many cases they are not long
enough to receive full anchorage. Mr. Thacher merely makes the dogmatic
statement that they are anchored. There is a faint hint of a reason in
his statement that they run into the compression part of the concrete.
Does he mean that the compression part of the concrete will grip the rod
like a vise? How does this comport with his contention farther on that
the beams are continuous? This would mean tension in the upper part of
the beam. In any beam the compression near the support, where the shear
is greatest, is small; so even this hint of an argument has no force or
meaning.

In this same paragraph Mr. Thacher states, concerning the third point
and the case of the retaining wall that is given as an example, "In a
counterfort, the inclined rods are sufficient to take the overturning
stress." Mr. Thacher does not make clear what he means by "overturning
stress." He seems to mean the force tending to pull the counterfort
loose from the horizontal slab. The weight of the earth fill over this
slab is the force against which the vertical and inclined rods of Fig.
2, at _a_, must act. Does Mr. Thacher mean to state seriously that it is
sufficient to hang this slab, with its heavy load of earth fill, on the
short projecting ends of a few rods? Would he hang a floor slab on a few
rods which project from the bottom of a girder? He says, "The proposed
method