North American hockey is a fast and violent game, played on ice, which began in Canada in the mid-nineteenth century. The six-member teams, wearing skates and heavy pads, use sticks with which to propel a flat rubber disk known as the puck. It is thought that hockey derives its name from the French word for a shepherd's crook, in reference to the shape of the sticks with their curved playing end. The origins of ice hockey are much debated, and have been sought in several other sports such as hurly, shinty, bandy, field hockey (played with a small, hard ball) or the Native American Mic Mac game; but there seems to be general agreement that the earliest match that can be identified with any certainty as hockey was played in 1855 on a frozen harbor by soldiers of the Royal Canadian Regiment in Kingston, Ontario. It remained an outdoor...