COMMUNICATIONS.

EDITORS HERALD-CRIMSON: - Your paper realizes the fact that base ball has a delimma, but fails to perceive that this dilemma, like most others, has two horns. You take one horn when you say the college must have more grounds. For eighteen men to play base ball a field of three or four acres is necessary. To make the game a general recreation for students at large would require all the unoceeupied land for miles around. President Eliot took the other horn of the dilemmanamely, that base ball should be supplanted by some game which requires less territory. Such a game is lawn tennis. The Jarvis base ball grounds, if laid out in double courts would furnish tennins grounds for over one hundred players.

The writer is far from advising the abolishment of the national game as a college sport; but the he believes that the game must look for support to other reasons than those advanced by your paper. Its support must lie in the fact that a good game affords to thousands of spectators a wonderful exhibition of presence of mind, skill, quickness and force of action.

For exercise the scientific game of base ball is indinitely inferior to tennis. In a good game all teh players except the pitcher, catcher and striker are inactive most of the time. The more skillful the game, the less exercise it furnishes. If base ball is to be played for exercise, we must encourage poor playing. The slower the pitching, the wilder the throwing, and the more frequent the muffing, with consequent increase of batting, base running and muddling, the better will the game be adapted for that purpose.

In fact. the game exists for the same reason that horse racing and circus exhibitions exist. The students who are good players are led into base ball by the eclat which good playing brings there. If fun and out-door exercise were the only motives, the scientific game of base ball would be forgotten in a week.

LIBBY, '86.