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Rh match out of eight; further, the game in question was played on Yorkshire territory, and Somerset, dismissed for 97, was headed on the first innings by 238 runs. In the end, Somerset won by 279! Who can classify, who promote, who degrade, when such extraordinary fluctuations are possible? It is clearly no solution of the promotion question to suggest that the lowest of the first-class counties should play the highest of the minor counties, the first-class certificate being the stake. Nor are matters facilitated when we remember that, for financial and other reasons, the minor counties contend in a competition in which only two days are allotted to a match instead of three. Doubtless public opinion, i.e. the opinion of the players who are before the public, offered the best solution of the difficulty of promotion by co-opting Worcestershire into their ranks, the formality being of the simplest nature; for Worcestershire, the fresh claimant for the highest honours, simply announced at the Counties' meeting that they had arranged to play the minimum number of matches that qualify for the first class with the requisite number of counties. The first-class counties co-opted Worcestershire; arbitration and adjudication were unnecessary.

In the infancy of county cricket the meetings of the different clubs were arranged by a sort of process which we may appropriately describe as natural selection. What could be more natural than the rivalry between the great professional sides—I am writing of the 'seventies—of Yorkshire and Nottingham,