discours en beaucoup d'endroits."[68] The whole was a most disgusting procedure, which, although greatly abused, was for a long time encouraged as offering a legal mode of dissolving a marriage which was incompatible with the happiness of both the parties, but which the law declared to be indissoluble. The judges who introduced or maintained the Congress, who, in fact, protected it, only contemplated it, but certainly most erroneously as a proper means of legalizing divorces. All historians, and other writers who have treated of this disgraceful institution, pretty generally agree in giving it an origin not further back than the commencement of the 16th century; it is, however, but the extension of a custom almost as obscene which prevailed in the first ages of Christianity. This was nothing less than the subjecting a young girl, whether nun or otherwise, accused of fornication, to a rigorous personal examination, whence was to result the proof of her innocence or guilt. Siagrius, Bishop of Verona, and who lived towards the close of the fourth century, condemned a nun to undergo this disgusting and insulting examination. St. Ambroise, his metropolitan, disapproved of the Bishop's sentence, declared the examination as indecent, thus attesting its existence. The opinion, however of this prelate, supposed as it was by that of several others, did not prevent the continuance of this custom for a very long time. The ecclesiastical and civil tribunals frequently directed this proof to be made; and Venette[69] cites the procès-verbal of a similar examination made by order of the Mayor of Paris in 1672, in the case of a woman who complained of violence committed on her by a man of dissolute habits. We prefer giving the following curious description of the manner of conducting the Congress in the original quaint and antiquated French: