As the game is at present played, the back is more of a third half-back than a goal-tend, and so should be trained to half-back work. It has been well said that all that one can ask of the best rush line is to hold the ground their half-backs gain; and when one follows carefully the progress of the play, he sees that this is the proper division of the work. The half-backs, then, must be the ground-gainers of the team. Such work calls for dash and fire--that ability to suddenly concentrate all the bodily energy into an effort that must make way through anything. Every one has such half-backs in mind, but unfortunately many of those half-backs who possess this type of character have not the necessary weight and strength to stand the amount of work required. Although a light man be occasionally found who is particularly muscular and wiry, the constant shock of going into a heavy line of forwards usually proves too exhausting for any but those of middle weight before the end of a season be reached. It is not that the work of a single game proves too much for the light-weight half. It is that in both practice and games he is so overmatched by the weight of the forwards whom he must meet that every week finds him less strong than the preceding, until his playing falls off so markedly that the captain or coach is at last convinced that there is something wrong, and the man is replaced by some one else, often too late to bring the substitute up to anything like the mark he might have reached had he been tried earlier in the season. Such thoughts as these will suggest themselves to the experienced coach when at the outset of a season he has placed before him a number of candidates for the position of half-back, among whom very likely there may be two or three men of perhaps one hundred and forty pounds' weight. Likely enough, too, these men may be at that period easily superior to the middle or heavy weights. In such a case the very best advice that can be whispered in the ear of coach or captain is, to make quarters or ends of them, even though it be only substitute quarters and ends. It will leave the way open for the proper cultivation of half-backs better built to stand the wear and tear of a season.