cult to play, especially on hard wickets. Take the case of W. G. Grace. It was almost a waste of time on hard wickets to put on fast bowlers when Mr. Grace was at his best. The sole advantage to be derived from so doing arose from the fact that it was advisable to distract his eye, and for this purpose a fast bowler was useful. By this we mean that, when slow bowlers were on at both ends, his eye would become more accustomed to the pace of the ground, and in a shorter time than it would have been if a fast bowler had been on at one end. But the fast bowler was on mainly to enable the slow bowler to get him out, and if the reader looks at Mr. Grace's enormous scores of a few years back he will find that Shaw, Southerton, Peate, and Lillywhite got him out a dozen times to the fast bowlers' once. And the runs that came from bowlers like Martin Mclntyre were astonishing; anywhere, cuts, pushes through any number of short-legs, big drives and colossal leg hits—all were alike to the great batsman.
On soft wickets, though many think otherwise, we believe that fast or medium-paced bowling is more difficult. This must be assumed only in the case of those fast bowlers who have power to keep their precision and pace on slow wickets. The variety of wickets, as is shown in the chapter on Bowling, is very great, and on the real mud, farmyard sort of wicket it is generally safe to presume that fast bowlers cannot act. When there is a slight drizzling rain, which keeps the ball and surface of the ground wet, fast bowlers flounder about like porpoises, and the only bowlers who can act at all are the slow, though they are very much handicapped. But on the real bowler's wicket, soft, yet gradually hardening by the effect of the sun, cæteris paribus, the fast or fast medium bowler will, as a rule, be the most deadly. The year 1879 was, on the whole, the wettest year for cricket that the present generation has seen, and it is instructive to turn to the result of the season's bowling for the County of Nottingham. This county possessed in Alfred Shaw and Morley the two best bowlers in England—one slow, the other fast. Here is the analysis of each for Nottingham:—
