Making for Barnes Bridge, the boat should keep fairly near to the Middlesex shore--how near depends upon whether the race is ordained to pass through the centre or the Middlesex arch of Barnes Bridge. Once through Barnes Bridge, the course should sheer in (if the centre arch has been taken) until the boat lies as if it had taken the shore arch. It should attain this position by the time it breasts the 'White Hart.' The river is here a horseshoe to the finish. In linear measure a boat on the Middlesex side has nearly two lengths less to travel than the one outside it between Barnes Bridge and the 'Ship.' The tide runs nearly as well within sixty feet of the shore as in mid-river at this point, hence it pays to keep about that distance from the Middlesex bank. The old Thames watermen who instruct young pilots over the Putney course are often inclined to run too much in the grooves which were good in their younger days, when they themselves were racing on the river. Their instruction would be sound enough if the features of the river had not undergone change, as aforesaid, in sundry details. The repeated blunders of navigation lately seen perpetrated by watermen as well as amateurs between Craven Steps and Hammersmith make us lose much faith in watermen's tuition for steering the metropolitan course. We would rather entrust a young pilot to some active member of the London or Thames Rowing Clubs. These gentlemen know the river well enough as it now is, and are not biassed by old memories of what it once was but is no longer. University coxswains have easier tasks in these days than their predecessors before 1868. Until the Thames Conservancy obtained statutory powers in 1868 to clear the course for boat-racing, it used to be a ticklish matter to pick a safe course on a flood tide. There would be strings of barges towed, and many more sailing, others 'sweeping,' up river. Traffic did not stop for sport. Coxswains often found themselves in awkward predicaments to avoid such itinerant craft, more so when barges were under sail against a head wind, and were tacking from shore to shore. In 1866 a barge of this sort most seriously interfered with the Cambridge crew in Horse Reach, just when Oxford had, after a stern race, given them the go-by off the Bathing-place. It extinguished any chance which might have been left for Cambridge.