Where Football Came From.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume XV, Issue 4407, 1 May 1893, Page 2

Where Football Came From.

Now that the football season (says Tho Million) in on, it may be interest-, ing to followers of tho game to l»jjjm that they owe it to tho RomMsT v There in no doubt that it 1 came over' to England with Julius Croear. It was played, too, by the Greeks, and in all likelihood, by more ancient people beforo them. But the actual origin of the game is lost in tho mists of time a Fierce wordy warfaro has been waged about the invention of printing, of gunpowder, of the mariner's compass, and so on, but these mysteries would be trifles light as air compared with the serious effort, if any man were insane enough to make it, to discover tho inventor of football. Depend upon it, the simpler ball games are aB old as the human race, and woman or child who first kickwHS

thing round, or threw it about spoft® tively, give riso to a rough and ready pastime out of which football and a host of other games grow during the centuries. Do not, however, run away with the notion that when the astonished B itons saw the Bomani at their game they saw football played as it is played to-day in London or Glasgow. Their pastime was of a much simpler, sort than oars, though, curiously enough, the Greeks seem, in some form of the game, to have handled the ball in a way that Bug* geßte at least the crude idea of the Rugby style, From the Komans tba natives soon learned tho game, and ill got that firm foothold in this country which it has ever since retained. 16 is strange that football took root ift •ho northern parts of England before the Southerners adopted it; and it

recorded of tbo North that they used to lay in wait lor the bridegroom aB he left the church after the wedding ceremony and demanded money from him for tbo gamo.