108 TlMEHRI. 
keeping with the character of the building, and its 
cool and collected officials. A very telling piece of mas- 
sive cresting, and perhaps the most telling in the town, 
is the cresting crowning the new Ice House building, 
while what we observe over Smith Brothers' store is 
both telling and advertizing. 
The iron parapets for some of our new bridges 
are simple, good, and effe6live. The arches and 
spandrels of the bridges all cast in iron, are particularly 
bold, well pierced, and from a distance very telling; 
not so however, some of the bridge railings, or iron 
parapets or palisading, for the designs of some of these 
are poor and paltry and favouring the Batty Langly style 
of gothic art ! nor have the Wind-Mill iron works com- 
pany reason to be proud of them, in point of art design. 
McFarlane'S designs on the whole are better, but no 
doubt his charges are much dearer.* 
The difficulty of securing good, sound, or lasting 
foundations to carry our curb stones, or support the 
walls below, has probably prevented the common use of 
more massive iron railing, with gates, gate-piers, and 
all complete ; hence the poverty-stricken wooden- 
palings, enclosing many even of our better class of 
houses, and calling upon those who work but these 
wooden fences to fashion them into form more telling or 
more artistic. 
About 14 years ago some good cast iron railing, tall 
and of fair design, and in good keeping, was made to 
* As we must import iron castings of art design it is well to patronize 
those Foundries where architects have been previously engaged to fur- 
nish designs. This must have been the case at McFarlane's or the 
Saracen foundry, for with scarce an exception all the designs in 
McFarlane's costly book of patterns are in the best of taste and styles. 
