if he adhered to fixed-seat work. It was the spectacle, in ear- lier days of the slide, of this unorthodox sliding style beating good specimens of fixed-seat oarsmanship which so horrified many of the retired good carsmen of the fixed-seat school. Before long the true use of the slide became better understood, and thus oarsmen—at all events scientific amateurs—began to realise that, while bad sliding could manage to command more pace than good fixed rowing, yet at the same time good sliding (which will be explained hereafter) will beat bad sliding by even more than the latter can distance good fixed-seat work.
Just a similar sort of prejudice-was displayed against the earlier style of rowing in keelless boats, When these craft first came in, oarsmen had little or no idea of ‘sitting’ them ; they rolled helplessly, and lost all form, but nevertheless they tra- yelled faster in the new craft than when rowing in good style in old-fashioned iron-shod keeled boats. In a season or two style reasserted itself, and it was found that it was by no means impossible to row in as neat a shape in a keeiless boat as ina keeled one.
Sliding on the seat had been practised long before the sliding seat was invented, but only to a modified extent. Robert Chambers of St. Antony’s, the quondam champion, tried it now and then, and when preparing for his 1865 match with Kelley he used to slide a trifle, especially for a spurt, and to grease his seat to facilitate his operations. Jack Clasper, according to Mr. E. D, Brickwood’s well-known treatise on Boat-racing, used to slide to a small extent on a fixed seat when he rowed in a Newcastle four which won on the Thames in 1857. Of this detail the writer has himself no recollection. Also, in 1867, a Tyne seuller, Percy, tried sliding on a fixed seat in a sculling match against J. Sadler on the Thames (so Mr. Brickwood relates). But none of these earlier sliders made much good aut of their novelty. The strain on the legs caused by the friction on the seat prevented the oarsman from main- taining the action for long, and meantime it took so much out of him that it prematurely exhausted his whole frame.
