A Method of Testing Concrete Blocks

York, with its populstion of 86,000, like most other towns, has suffered from the depression in trade following the War, and in consequence many of its citizens have been unable to find employment. F.W. Spurr

It is too often forgotten that England is a country of bridges, and has been so since Elizabethan times. There were about nine hundred of them by the middle of the seventeenth century. Are these nine hundred still with us? Alas, their numbers must by now be very sensibly reduced, and that not because of any inherent defects, but because we of the twentieth century insist that our roads and bridges shall carry burdens which eighty years ago would only have been entrusted to a specially constructed track of steel. As the volume of modern traffic swells, one bridge after another becomes inadequate both in size and strength; too narrow, that is, to contain it, and too weak to support it. What is to be done? Shall it be widened, or strengthened, or both, or neither? Such, in brief, is the choice open to those whose duty it is to provide smooth and ample roads and bridges for the thousands of internal combustion vehicles that daily troop forth from American and European factories. It is not an enviable task; to some it may seem a never-ending one comparable to that upon which poor Sisyphus was (and perhaps is still) engaged. What width must the widening add, what strength the strengthening? Is it enough if they serve the need of today, or must they be prepared for that of to-morrow, and perchance the day after, too? Roads and bridges that once were wide are already narrow, and will be narrower still in a few years' time. Christian Barman

AN engineer is now able to create in his imagination and to make stable in actuality a A very great variety of structural shapes. There comes a time when people ask "Are these shapes beautiful?” and the interrogatory can be much further expanded-“If the shapes are not beautiful can they be made so?" Then supposing- that the answer to this latter question is in the affirmative, engineers will demand to know who is to be the judge whether this mysterious quality of beauty has, in fact, been achieved, and some of them may even be bold enough to inquire whether such a quality is really necessary in the majority of those structures which serve our needs in this industrial age. A. Trystan Edwards