When I first formed the presumptuous design of editing this work, it was my original purpose to divide this chapter into two parts, whereof the one should treat of the development of batting and the other of the development of bowling. But I very soon found that such a division would never do, for it would be a dividing of two things that were in their nature indivisible, from the historian’s point of view, the one being the correlative of the other, and the effects of the one upon the other being ever constant. Of course those effects have been mutual; the bowling has educated the batting, and in his turn, again, the batsman has been the instructor of the bowler. No sooner has the one changed his tactics at all than the other has changed front a little in order to meet this new attack. Naturally, perhaps, it seems that the bowler has the oftener taught the batsman, than _vice versa_; the aggressor, by a new form of attack, forcing on the defendant a new line of defence. I think it is the generally accepted view to-day that it is the bowling “that makes the batting,” but on the other hand one is inclined to think that the excellence of the Australian bowling, and also of their wicket-keeping and general fielding, is very much the result of playing on such perfect wickets that the batsman practically would never get out unless fielding, wicket-keeping, and bowling were all of the highest quality. Therefore, in that special instance it may rather be said that the batting, under specially favourable conditions of climate and wickets, has “made the bowling.” Of course the natural effect of playing on perfect wickets in matches that last as many days as you please has had its effect, and to us not altogether a pleasing effect, on the Australian batting, but this is scarcely the place to consider that feature of the case. The first point of interest to notice is that Beldham is quite at one with us in attributing the advance in batting to the advance of bowling, notably to the wonderful bowling of Harris, which was of that portentous character to which the name of epoch-making is not misapplied, and Nyren is of the same opinion with Beldham, whom he considers to have been the first to play Harris’s bowling with success by getting out to it at the pitch.