One of the Professor’s first efforts was in the direction of finding out the speed with which the ball left the club; and it was a long time--years, in fact--before he came to any definite understanding on the point; so difficult did he find the investigation, despite all the experiments he made, the _formulæ_ that he applied to them, and the scientific instruments that he brought to bear on the problem. He had a very capable observer, Mr. T. Hodge, making examinations of the flight of balls driven in actual play at St. Andrews, by the help of the instrument known as the Bashforth Chronograph, with which the speed of bullets is measured; and, what with the results arrived at in this way and others, he came to the conclusion that the initial speed of the ball was over 500 feet a second, which speed, of course, was lost very quickly as the resistance of the air was encountered. With this as his starting-point, he made many deductions; but subsequently he found that he was wrong in the original assumption. A vast number of calculations and experiments followed. In a cellar he constructed a complicated pendulum arrangement, to the bob of which there was attached a large screen with a thick clay surface, and against this he got several well-known golfers to drive their hardest, and made the most minute calculations as to the effect upon the pendulum. The clay was scattered in all directions, damage was done, and the golfers complained that under such circumstances they were not able to drive their best. The pendulum and the strangeness of the whole arrangement “put them off.” Some time afterwards he constructed an improved pendulum, the clay screen being fixed on to lengths of clock spring, and when this was placed in a doorway the golfers were again set to drive at it. What with one thing and another the Professor at last came to the final and definite conclusion, that the ball started from the club at a speed, in the case of a good drive, of about 240 feet a second, but that in the case of exceptional balls it sometimes was as much as 300 or even 350 feet per second. This, of course, was with the gutta ball; and the resiliency and initial speed of the rubber-cored ball being certainly much greater, it is fair to believe that the average initial speed of a well-driven ball in these days is quite 300 feet a second; or, to put it in another way, over two hundred miles an hour. Great as this speed appears, it might be mentioned incidentally that the muzzle velocity of a bullet from a Maxim gun is generally about 2000 feet a second, or about seven times as fast. III