traffic. In building a new railroad through timber country it is in the line of true economy to put steel spans temporarily on pile piers in order to avoid the excessive cost of hauling in substructure materials before the track reaches the site. In such cases the temporary piers should be located far enough from the positions of the permanent piers to allow the latter to be constructed without interfering with traffic.

The employment of the cocked hat in pier shafts is generally an architectural extravagance that should be avoided whenever its use is not demanded by the necessity for spreading the base over a wide pile foundation. It certainly relieves the monotony of appearance in a tall shaft, but the principles of economy generally bar it out. Only once in the author's career has he ever been guilty of adopting the cocked hat, viz., in the late eighties when he made the design for what was then termed the Winner Bridge over the Missouri River at Kansas City, the spans of which were proportioned to carry between the trusses a single-track railway with a narrow foot-walk on each side and a single-track roadway outside of each truss, thus making the perpendicular distance between central planes of trusses twenty-five (25) feet. It proved to be a fortunate thing that the cocked hat was employed, for the superstructure of the Winner Bridge was never erected, because of lack of funds; and when the double-deck, double-track, Fratt Bridge was built on the old piers, after cutting down the shafts to an elevation of ten feet above high-water mark, the extra length of pier afforded by the said cocked hat provided just the necessary extra size for permitting the superstructure to be widened sufficiently to carry the double track.

Ice breakers are sometimes used where there is no real need for them, because it takes an enormous amount of thick ice to damage any well- founded pier having a shaft with rounded ends; nor, as a rule, does a concrete pier require special protection against the grinding of ice. If real granitoid of one-two-three composition with ten per cent of hydrated lime added to the cement were substituted for the ordinary concrete between high-water and low-water marks and extending into the mass about twelve inches, the protection thus afforded would almost always be ample and would involve very little additional expense. Moreover, the repairing of an abraded pier-surface by means of granitoid is not a difficult matter. Unless a pier rest on bed rock, the placing of an unbalanced ice-break upon it is going to upset the equality of load distribution over the foundations and thus, possibly, cause trouble. In case of a pier on piles, it would be better to put another ice-break on the down-stream end of the pier for the sake of symmetry, although it would serve no useful purpose as an ice-break per se. All violations of the precept of symmetry are to be avoided whenever this is practicable; for, by so doing, trouble also is often avoided.

The economic question of reinforced-concrete versus timber for cribs and caissons is beginning to loom up. At the same total first cost, timber is preferable, owing to the ease and rapidity with which it may be put in place;