the invention of the art of boxing, at least with skill and bare hands.
"James Figg was the father of boxing," says "The History of British Boxing," and "Broughton was the first man who taught countering and parrying and bending to escape a Blow." This
RAW-HIDE CESTUS FROM
HERCULANEUM.
claims quite too much.
Two thousand five hundred years ago Greek boxers used only their bare hands. They did nothing rudely, or incompletely, in Greece; and their exercise must have been much the same as ours. Later, as the contests at the great national games of Greece became fiercely earnest, the hands and arms were surrounded with thongs of leather, at first reaching to the wrists, like our "hard gloves," then carried up to the elbow, and afterward extending up to the shoulder, the hands being heavily weighted and knobbed with lead and iron.
The cestus of the Greeks, copied by the Romans, was a dreadful boxing glove, or gauntlet, composed of raw-hide thongs and metal.
