The same author is much, and it would seem somewhat unnecessarily, distressed at the fact that the writer of a 14th century manuscript preserved in Trinity College, Oxford, and the Venerable Bede are not in harmony as to the early capacities of the athletic saint, Cuthbert. The former says of him that “he pleyde atte balle with the children that his fellowes were,” while the latter merely makes mention of his general excellence at games involving great muscular exertion. The plain fact of the matter is, that the origin of the ball is one of those matters which must of necessity be lost in antiquity. Nature herself supplies an endless variety of balls of all sizes, suitable for throwing from hand to hand, and the act of playing with them is instinctive. The apple and the orange are, so to speak, objects which nature supplies, not only as objects of food, but also as materials for pastime; clay, too, and snow, are of so plastic a nature that the hands even of children naturally mould them into a spherical form and hurl them to and fro in sport. Before, however, an attempt be made to show how the game of football became developed as a specific sport, it is without doubt the duty of sober historians first to chronicle the legends which have attached themselves to the foundation of the game. Firstly, it is said that in ancient times it was the custom to kick a large stone from parish to parish, both in Scotland and in England, for the purpose of marking boundaries and asserting rights of way; and that in this practice, which was indulged in by large bodies of the parishioners, each of whom desired to give his kick when he got the opportunity, we are to find the origin of football. Certain it is, at any rate, that the practice of kicking a leather football over a path on Whit-Monday, for the purpose of exercising a right of way, endured into the present century in the Isle of Purbeck in Dorsetshire, a ball being annually presented to the workmen of certain quarries for that purpose. But the origin of the practice, both in that locality and in some other parts of the country where it is known to have been followed, is shrouded in antiquity; and there is little evidence to show that this practice caused the rise of football, instead of having arisen at a time when the game itself was well known. This latter view seems the most probable. The second legend of the origin of the game is one of a gruesome character, and far more suitable to be chronicled in connection with the legendary or mythical stage of history. The ancient Teutons, it is averred, did not scalp the bodies of their slaughtered enemies (as did the Choctaws), nor did they mutilate them (as do the Bashi-bazouks), but in grim sport cut off their heads and kicked them about, after the fashion of the Baron in the Ingoldsby legend of Sheppey, who, after he had donned the famous boots, first killed the holy father with a magnificent “punt,” and afterwards