Excerpt from Table Tennis: A Description of the Game, With Rules and Instructions for Playing

Royal Aquarium, and The ping-pong Association, with its champion ships decided at the Queen's Hall. It seems a pity, of course, that there should be two associations under different names, both playing exactly the same game under the same rules, but it is owing to the fact' that Messrs. John Jaques Son and Hamley Bros. Own the copyright, and in England, unless with their consent, no one is allowed to use the word ping-pong. Table Tennis seems to be a much more sensible name, as it is Lawn Tennis played on a table and although no one ever uses the courts which are marked out on the table as a variation for a foursome, it makes rather an interesting game.

Ping Pong received its name from the sounds which the banjo head of the racquets gave out when striking the little celluloid balls, and as now not one man in a hundred plays with anything except a wooden racquet, the appropriateness of the name seems to have been done away with. There is almost as much argument now as to the rival merits of wooden, vellum, cork, leather covered, sandpapered faces, gut and metal racquets as there used to be over the merits and demerits of different heads of golf clubs, but a great deal of the talk is nonsense, and the best are most assuredly the wooden ones, at least the writer has never found anyone who was not perfectly willing to discard his old vellum or gut racquet as soon as he tried a wooden one. At the Aquarium Championship in England recently, one woman emphasized her supreme contempt for all the new patent racquets by playing through the whole tournament with the back of her hand mirror, and a corking good game she played, and received more applause than anyone.

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