ruption left it, or to place it
where he thinks it would have stopped, if unmolested. This again is a
rule far less simple, and liable to produce far more wrangling, than the
principle of the other authorities, which is that the ball should either
be left where it lies, or be carried to the end of the arena.

These points are all among the commonest that can be raised, and it is
very unfortunate that there should be no uniformity of rule, to meet
contingencies so inevitable. When more difficult points come up for
adjudication, the difficulty has thus far been less in the conflict of
authorities than in their absence. Until the new American commentator
appeared, there was no really scientific treatise on croquet to be had
in our bookstores.

The so-called manual of the "Newport Croquet Club" is understood to
proceed from a young gentleman whose mathematical attainments have won
him honor both at Cambridge and at New Haven, and who now beguiles his
banishment as Assistant Professor in the Naval Academy by writing on
croquet in the spirit of Peirce. What President Hill has done for
elementary geometry, "Newport" aims to do for croquet, making it
severely simple, and, perhaps we might add, simply severe. And yet,
admirable to relate, this is the smallest of all the manuals, and the
cheapest, and the only one in which there is not so much as an allusion
to ladies' ankles. All the others have a few pages of rules and a very
immoderate quantity of slang; they are all liable to the charge of being
silly; whereas the only possible charge to be brought against "Newport"
is that he is too sensible. But for those who hold, with ourselves, that
whatever is worth doing is worth doing sensibly, there is really no
other manual. That is, this is the only one which really grapples with a
difficult case, and deals with it as if heaven and earth depended on the
adjudication.

It is possible that this scientific method sometimes makes its author
too bold a lawgiver. The error of most of the books is in attempting too
little and in doing that little ill. They are all written for beginners
only. The error of "Newport" lies in too absolute an adherence to
principles. His "theory of double points" is excellent, but his theory
of "the right of declining" is an innovation all the more daring because
it is so methodically put. The principle has long been familiar, though
never perhaps quite settled, that where two distinct points were made by
a