begun early in the afternoon. The use of the "lively ball" made the game uncertain. A batted ball would strike the ground at a distance from the fielder that would make its capture under favorable conditions easy and sure; but, because of some inequality of surface, or the presence of some impediment unseen, it would be deflected and with such suddenness and unlocked for rapidity that it was impossible to prevent its escape, or to check the base running epidemic that almost invariably followed a mishap of this kind. Moreover, the "lively ball" was accountable for such ridiculous scores that its abandonment was decided upon as a means of making the sport more interesting to spectators and less enervating to players. It is of record that, in one of its games, the Niagara team, of Buffalo, won by a score of 201 to 11.
So, in place of the "lively ball," yielding a score of three figures to the winners, a "dead ball," containing no elasticity whatever, was tried, with the result that many games of nine innings were played without a run on either side. It was about this time that the expression, "fell with a dull thud," began to find a place in our literature, and there can be no doubt as to its origin; for that is exactly how the "dead ball" struck the earth. In a game between Harvard University and a team from Manchester, N. H., played with a dead ball in 1879, the score stood to at the end of twenty-four innings, and this because of the nature of the ball used, rather than the superiority of the players using it.
Like everything else in the evolution of Base Ball, the ball had gone to the extreme limit of liveliness and to the
