SURPRISING INGENUITY.

Te Aroha News, Volume VI, Issue 362, 24 April 1889, Page 5

SURPRISING INGENUITY.

One of their refinements of cruelty was to fa&ten the victim firmly by his hands to the ground, and then, by means of a windlass worked by long arms aud strong men, pull the wretch's limbs out of joint by attaching a rope to his feet and lengthening him out gradually till something gave way. Another method for political criminals was to hurl them from the Tarpeian Rock. But even in their methods the old Saxons could give them a point in wholesale butchery. One of the favourite methods of oui dear old barbaric foiofathers in disposing of their prisonei s of war was to sacrifice them to their gods in the "Wicker Image, which is described as ' a statue or image ot a man in a vast proportion, whose limbs consisted of twigs \\ea\ed together in the naturo of basket-wear ; these were filled with live men and after that set on fire, and so the poor creatuieb were destroyed in ye smoak and flames.' The cruelties of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were terrible, and in the torture chambers the instruments used were surely the devices of hell. The torture instruments in the Tower of London form a loathsome collection. A refinement of cruelty was that committed by the Dutch on the English in Araboyna, where the victim's arms were nailed to the upper beam of a doorway, his feet tied to the sides, underneath the solet> were placed lighted candles, torches were applied to his armpits, and then, after a bandage had been placed about his chin, beer was poured into his mouth, and he was compelled to swallow it until he was as fullbodied as an ordinary Dutch burgomaster. The idea that the pcor wretch was filled with beer may be scoutod, unless it wore stale and undrinkable. Anyway, it was a terrible punishment for any Briton who had not been a Heidelberg student. The French method of executing criminals is by means of the guillotine, the invention of a certain Dr. Guillotin. The first trial was given to it on April 25th, 1792, when a dead body was decapitated successfully.