be firmly gripped in wet concrete. The writer has been unable to
find any record of the tests to which Mr. Thacher refers. The tests
made at the University of Illinois, far from showing reinforcement of
this type to be "worse than useless," showed most excellent results by
its use.

That which is condemned in the seventh point is not so much the
calculating of reinforced concrete beams as continuous, and reinforcing
them properly for these moments, but the common practice of lopping off
arbitrarily a large fraction of the simple beam moment on reinforced
concrete beams of all kinds. This is commonly justified by some virtue
which lies in the term monolith. If a beam rests in a wall, it is "fixed
ended"; if it comes into the side of a girder, it is "fixed ended"; and
if it comes into the side of a column, it is the same. This is used to
reduce the moment at mid-span, but reinforcement which will make the
beam fixed ended or continuous is rare.

There is not much room for objection to Mr. Thacher's rule of spacing
rods three diameters apart. The rule to which the writer referred as
being 66% in error on the very premise on which it was derived, namely,
shear equal to adhesion, was worked out by F.P. McKibben, M. Am. Soc. C.
E. It was used, with due credit, by Messrs. Taylor and Thompson in their
book, and, without credit, by Professors Maurer and Turneaure in their
book. Thus five authorities perpetrate an error in the solution of one
of the simplest problems imaginable. If one author of an arithmetic had
said two twos are five, and four others had repeated the same thing,
would it not show that both revision and care were badly needed?

Ernest McCullough, M. Am. Soc. C. E., in a paper read at the Armour
Institute, in November, 1908, says, "If the slab is not less than
one-fifth of the total depth of the beam assumed, we can make a
T-section of it by having the narrow stem just wide enough to contain
the steel." This partly answers Mr. Thacher's criticism of the ninth
point. In the next paragraph, Mr. McCullough mentions some very nice
formulas for T-beams by a certain authority. Of course it would be
better to use these nice formulas than to pay attention to such
"rule-of-thumb" methods as would require more width in the stem of the T
than enough to squeeze the steel in.

If these complex formulas for T-beams (which disregard utterly the
simple and essential requirement that there must be concrete enough in
the stem