In the case of slabs which are uniformly loaded by earth or water pressure, the bending moments are regularly taken as (w l^{2})/24 in the center and (w l^{2})/12 at the supports.  The writer never observed any failure of continuous beams over the supports, although he has often noticed failures in the supporting columns directly under the beams, where these columns are light in comparison with the beams.  Failure of slabs over the supports is common, and therefore the writer always places extra rods over the supports near the top surface.

The width of the beams which Mr. Godfrey derives from his simple rule, that is, the width equals the sum of the peripheries of the reinforcing rods, is not upheld by theory or practice.  In the first place, this width would depend on the kind of rods used.  If a beam is reinforced by three 7/8-in. round bars, the width, according to his formula, would be 8.2 in.  If the beam is reinforced by six 5/8-in. bars which have the same sectional area as the three 7/8-in. bars, then the width should be 12 in., which is ridiculous and does not correspond with tests, which would show rather a better behavior for the six bars than for the three larger bars in a beam of the same width.

It is surprising to learn that there are engineers who still advocate such a width of the stem of T-beams that the favorable influence of the slab may be dispensed with, although there were many who did this 10 or 12 years ago.

It certainly can be laid down as an axiom that the man who uses complicated formulas has never had much opportunity to design or build in reinforced concrete, as the design alone might be more expensive than the difference in cost between concrete and structural steel work.

The author attacks the application of the elastic theory to reinforced concrete arches.  He evidently has not made very many designs in which he used the elastic theory, or he would have found that the abutments need be only from three to four times thicker than the crown of the arch (and, therefore, their moments of inertia from 27 to 64 times greater), when the deformation of the abutments becomes negligible in the elastic equations.  Certainly, the elastic theory gives a better guess in regard to the location of the line of pressure than any guess made without its use.  The elastic theory was fully proved for arches by the remarkable tests, made in 1897 by the Austrian Society of Engineers and Architects, on full-sized arches of 70-ft. span, and the observed deflections and lateral deformations agreed exactly with the figured deformation.

Tests on full-sized arches also showed that the deformations caused by temperature changes agree with the elastic theory, but are not as great for the whole mass of the arch as is commonly assumed.  The elastic theory enables one to calculate arches much more quickly than any graphical or guess method yet proposed.