counsel on both sides have taken in the matter. Gentlemen, the abilities and erudi tion of counsel are above all praise. Where all displayed such eloquence and legal skill it would be as difficult as invidious to say who was best. In fact, gentlemen of the jury, they were all best. Gentlemen, the authori ties and precedents they have advanced in this most knotty and important case are, like a hare in Tipperary, to be found in Fearne (fern)! ' "Now," continued O'Connell, as he re lated this bit of judicial buffoonery, " in some years to come, if these things should be preserved, people won't believe them."
But Lord Norbury gave stranger charges still. When charging the jury in the action of Guthrie v. Sterne, to recover damages for criminal conversation with the plaintiffs wife, his lordship said : " Gentlemen of the jury, the defendant in this case is William Henry Godfrey Baker Sterne, and there, gentlemen of the jury, you have him from stem to stern. I am free to observe, genlemen, that if this Mr. William Henry God frey Baker Sterne had as many Christian virtues as he has Christian names we never should see the honest gentleman figuring here as a defendant in an action for crim. con."
BARBARIC MILITARY PUNISHMENTS. By John De Morgan. FROM the earliest time soldiers, that is, those who join the ranks, have been treated as machines, made to do certain work, and failing in the slightest degree, subjected to the most barbaric punishment. The record of military punishment of the last century is full of instances of the most dire cruelty. There is no need to go to sav age or semi-savage nations, but only to look at the military history of Great Britain, and we shall find the most ghastly tortures in flicted with a view of subduing a supposed mutinous spirit. One favorite method of correction was known as " picketing." The victim was sus pended by the wrist to an iron ring, let into a wall or a high post, and one of his heels was permitted to rest upon a sharpened stick, just blunt enough not to break the skin. Thus the whole weight of the body was thrown either upon the bare heel or upon the wrist. The agony in either case was extreme. In a moment of demoniac cruelty some officer invented a device called "the wooden horse." Rough sharp boards were nailed
together so that they would form a rude im itation of a horse, the back forming a sharp ridge. On this a culprit was made to sit, sometimes for hours at a time, and to increase the pain, muskets, and even heavy weights were fastened to the legs. A man was once made to sit on the wooden horse, half an hour a day for six days, with a petticoat on him, and a paper pinned to his back bearing the inscription : " Such is the reward of my merit." His offense was cowardice. During the Peninsular War, there was a punishment much used, called the " Strap pado." It was Spanish in its origin and brutal in its torture. The soldier was hoisted up by means of a rope fastened to his arms behind his back, and then suddenly dropped with a jerk, by which process his shoulder joints were sometimes dislocated. "Trussing" was another favorite torture. In this the culprit was seated on the ground, and two muskets were placed, one under his thighs and the other on his neck. These were drawn closer and closer together by means of cartouche straps until, says a mili tary writer, his neck and heels touched,
