just mentioned in connection with the bent-up rod. It concerns the
anchorage of rods by the embedment of a few inches of their length in
concrete. This most flagrant violation of common sense has its most
conspicuous example in large engineering works, where of all places
better judgment should prevail. Many retaining walls have been built,
and described in engineering journals, in papers before engineering
societies of the highest order, and in books enjoying the greatest
reputation, which have, as an essential feature, a great number of rods
which cannot possibly develop their strength, and might as well be of
much smaller dimensions. These rods are the vertical and horizontal rods
in the counterfort of the retaining wall shown at _a_, in Fig. 2. This
retaining wall consists of a front curtain wall and a horizontal slab
joined at intervals by ribs or counterforts. The manifest and only
function of the rib or counterfort is to tie together the curtain wall
and the horizontal slab. That it is or should be of concrete is because
the steel rods which it contains, need protection. It is clear that
failure of the retaining wall could occur by rupture through the Section
_A B_, or through _B C_. It is also clear that, apart from the cracking
of the concrete of the rib, the only thing which would produce this
rupture is the pulling out of the short ends of these reinforcing rods.
Writers treat the triangle, _A B C_, as a beam, but there is absolutely
no analogy between this triangle and a beam. Designers seem to think
that these rods take the place of so-called shear rods in a beam, and
that the inclined rods are equivalent to the rods in a tension flange of
a beam. It is hard to understand by what process of reasoning such
results can be attained. Any clear analysis leading to these conclusions
would certainly be a valuable contribution to the literature on the
subject. It is scarcely possible, however, that such analysis will be
brought forward, for it is the apparent policy of the reinforced
concrete analyst to jump into the middle of his proposition without the