tells us absolutely nothing of all this. The cable simply disappears on one side and reappears on the other, as if it were two separate cables, one on each side, instead of one continuous chain. Look at this section of the top of the tower, and see how an exquisite refinement of mechanical arrangement may coexist with absolute insensibility to the desirableness even of an architectural expression of this arrangement. The architecture of this crowning member of the tower has nothing whatever to do with the purpose for which the structure exists. Is it not perfectly evident that an architectural expression of this mechanical arrangement would require that the line of the summit, instead of this meaningless flat coping, should, to begin with, be a crest of roof, its double slope following the line of the cable which it shelters? Here the very channel through which the cable runs is not designed, but is a mere hole occurring casually, and not by premeditation, in the midst of the mouldings which form the cornice of the tower. This is architectural barbarism. Other opportunities offered for architectural expression in the towers themselves were in the treatment of the buttresses, in the treatment of the balconies which girdle the tower at the height of the roadway, and in the modelling of the arches. The girth of each of the towers at the water-line is 398 feet. At the roof-course it is 378 feet. The reduction is effected by means of five or six offsets, which withdraw each face of the tower four feet between the bottom and the top, and each end six feet. The counter-forts, eight in all, on the sides of the outer piers and on the faces of all the piers, are mere applied strips, very shallow in proportion to their width, and terminating in the capital-like projections which are casually pierced to receive the cables. It may make, perhaps, no serious difference in the mechanical efficiency of these counter-forts whether their area be narrow and deep or broad and shallow. But an increase of depth in proportion to width would of itself, with its higher lights and sharper shadows, have made forcible masses of what are now ineffectual features. This inherent effect would be very greatly enhanced if the offsets themselves were accentuated by sharp and decisive modelling. As it is, emphasis seems to have been studiously avoided. The offsets are merely long batterings of the wall, which do nothing to separate the piers into related parts with definite transitions, and so to refine the crudity of the masses. To see the difference between a mechanical and a monumental conception of a great structure, compare these towers with the front of Amiens, or of Strasburg, or of Notre Dame of Paris. Of course the designer of a modern bridge must not attempt to reproduce in his work “those misty masses of multitudinous pinnacle and diademed tower.” That would be a more fatal fault than the rudeness and crudeness with which we have to charge the