Not many years ago physicians had cerNot certain rules and practices by which they were tain guided as to when and where to bleed a paguided patient in order to relieve or cure him. What tient of those rules and practices to-day? If they were logical, why have they been abandoned?

It is the purpose of this paper to show that reinforced concrete engineers have certain rules and practices which are no more logical than those governWing the blood-letting of former days. If the writer fails in this, by reason of the more weighty arguments on the other side of the questions he propounds, he will at least have brought out good reasons which will stand the test of logic for the rules and practices which he proposes to condemn, and which, at the presproposes present time, are quite lacking in the voluminous ent literature on this comparatively new subject.