The latest attempt to fasten an English tab on the American game is noteworthy. Not content to stand by the theory that our game is sprung from the English rounders, it is now intimated that baseball itself, the same game and under the same name, is of English origin. To complete the chain, it is now only necessary for some English writer to tell us that "in 1845 a number of English gentlemen sojourning in New York organized a club called the Knickbockers, and introduced to Americans the old English game of base-ball." This new departure has not yet gained much headway, but it must be noticed on account of the circumstances of its appearance. The edition of Chambers' Encyclopedia just out, in its article on "base- ball" says that the game was mentioned in Miss Austen's Northanger Abbey, written about 1798, and leaves us to infer that it was the same game that we now know by that name. It was not necessary to go into the realm of fiction to find this ancient use of the name. A writer to the London Times in 1874 pointed out that in 1748 the family of Frederick, Prince of Wales, were represented as engaged in a game of base-ball. Miss Austen refers to base-ball as played by the daughters of "Mrs. Morland," the eldest of whom was fourteen. In Elaine's Rural Sports, London, 1852, in an introduction to ball games in general, occurs this passage: "There are few of us of either sex but have engaged in base- ball since our majority." Whether in all these cases the same game was meant matters not, and it is not established by the mere identity of names. "Base," as meaning a place of safety, dates its origin from the game of "prisoners' base" long before anything in the shape of base-ball or rounders; so that any game of ball in which bases were a feature would likely be known by that name. The fact that in the three instances in which we find the name mentioned it is always a game for girls or women, would justify the suspicion that it was not always the same game, and that it in any way resembled our game is not to be imagined. Base- ball in its mildest form is essentially a robust game, and it would require an elastic imagination to conceive of little girls possessed of physical powers such as its play demands. Besides, if the English base-ball of 1748, 1798, and 1852 were the same as our base-ball we would have been informed of that fact long ago, and it would never have been necessary to attribute the origin of our game to rounders. And when, in 1874, the American players were introducing base-ball to Englishmen, the patriotic Britain would not have said, as he then did, that our game was "only rounders with the rounder left out," but he would at once have told us that base-ball itself was an old English game. But this latest theory is altogether untenable and only entitled to consideration on account of the authority under which it is put forth.