For many years prominent architects have very justly inveighed against the inherent ugliness of American bridges. In order, therefore, to see what such violations of aesthetics in bridge-designing really are, and to what extent they can be avoided, the author has asked his friend, Henry Van Brunt, Esq., of the architectural firm of Van Brunt & Howe, who is acknowledged by the leading members of his profession to be one of the foremost living masters of the science of architecture, to write for publication in this treatise a letter formulating the charges of himself and his professional brethren against the bridge-builders of this country in respect to their alleged offences against the aesthetics of construction. In response to this request Mr. Van Brunt has written the following letter:

My dear Mr. Waddell:

After looking over a portion of your instructive treatise on bridges, I find it quite impossible to comply with your request to furnish you with practical suggestions from an architectural point of view as to grace and beauty of design in such structures. As these qualities must be developed from the structure itself, as they must be evolved from its inherent economical and practical conditions, and as they cannot be successfully applied to it as an afterthought, it would be unbecoming for any layman to attempt to show by what process this evolution is to be accomplished. The problem is not an easy one; it is not to be solved by theory, or by any accident of invention or ingenuity. At present, at least, it can only be treated on general lines. Indeed there is no one living, I fear, who can suggest a specific and easily applied remedy for that disease of engineering which is expressed in the curious fact that the most perfect results of science, at least in the art of steel-bridge building as now understood and inculcated, do not recognize any theory of beauty in line or mass.

It is the business of the architect to express structure and purpose with beauty. It is the business of the engineer, as I understand it, to make structures strong, durable, rigid, and economical; to apply pure science, excluding, as a matter of principle, any device of art which, for the sake of mere ornamentation, may add to his fabric a pound of unnecessary weight or a dollar of unnecessary cost.

It cannot be denied that to whatever extent the exercise of this principle may have affected the practice of engineers, they have succeeded, especially as regards bridge-building, in developing a structure which is in every essential respect orderly, consistent, and progressive from a practical point of view. From year to year this development towards mechanical perfection has been plainly visible. The structure of ten years ago has been reasonably and properly superseded by another and better structure, indicating a process of growth without a shadow of