f a minute for recuperation. The
practical effect of this was that a combatant could always get a respite
of half a minute whenever he wanted it by pretending to be knocked down:
"finding the earth the safest place," as the old phrase went. For this
the Marquess of Queensberry substituted a rule that a round with the
gloves should last a specified time, usually three or four minutes, and
that a combatant who did not stand up to his opponent continuously
during that time (ten seconds being allowed for rising in the event of a
knock-down) lost the battle. That unobtrusively slipped-in ten seconds
limit has produced the modern glove fight. Its practical effect is that
a man dazed by a blow or a fall for, say, twelve seconds, which would
not have mattered in an old-fashioned fight with its thirty seconds
interval,[1] has under the Queensberry rules either to lose or else
stagger to his feet in a helpless condition and be eagerly battered into
insensibility by his opponent before he can recover his powers of
self-defence. The notion that such a battery cannot be inflicted with
boxing gloves is only entertained by people who have never used them or
seen them used. I may say that I have myself received, in an accident, a
blow in the face, involving two macadamized holes in it, more violent
than the most formidable pugilist could have given me with his bare
knuckles. This blow did not stun or disable me even momentarily. On the
other hand, I have seen a man knocked quite silly by a tap from the most
luxurious sort of boxing glove made, wielded by a quite unathletic
literary man sparring for the first time in his life. The human jaw,
like the human elbow, is provided, as every boxer knows, with a "funny
bone"; and the pugilist who is lucky enough to jar that funny bone with
a blow practically has his opponent at his mercy for at least ten
seconds. Such a blow is called a "knock-out." The funny bone and the
ten-seconds rule explain the development of Queensberry sparring into
the modern knocking-out match or glove fight.

[1] In a treatise on boxing by Captain Edgeworth Johnstone,
just published, I read, "In the days of the prize-ring, fights lasted
for hours; and the knock-out blow was unknown." This statement is a
little too sweeping. The blow was known well enough. A veteran
prizefighter once described to me his first experience of its curious
effect on the senses. Only, as he had thirty seconds to recover in
instead of ten, i