The last instance in which the press was inflicted was at Kilkenny in Ireland. A man named Matthew Ryan stood mute at his trial for highway robbery, and was adjudged by the jury to be guilty of "wilful and affected dumbness and lunacy." He was given some days' grace, but still remaining dumb, he was pressed to death in the public market of Kilkenny. As the weights were put upon him the wretched man broke silence and implored that he might be hanged, but the sheriff could not grant his request. In 1731 a new press was made and fixed in the press-yard, for the punishment of a highwayman named Cook, but it was not used. At length, in 1772, the law on this head was altered and judgment was awarded against mutes as though convicted or they had confessed. In 1778 one so suffered at the Old Bailey. Finally, it was provided that the court should enter a plea of "Not guilty" when the prisoner refused to plead. The principal forms of capital punishment, however, as the derivation of the expression implies, have dealt with the head as the most vulnerable part of the body. Death has been and still is most generally inflicted by decapitation and strangulation. The former, except in France, where it came to be universal, was the most aristocratic method; the latter was long applied only to criminals of the baser sort. Until the invention of the guillotine, culprits were beheaded by sword or axe, and were often cruelly mangled by a bungling executioner. It is asserted by the historian that the executioner pursued the Countess of Salisbury about the scaffold, aiming repeated blows at her, before he succeeded in striking off her head. This uncertainty in result was only ended by the ingenious invention of Doctor Guillotin, the prototype of which existed in the time of the Scotch "Maiden." The regent Morton, who introduced this instrument into Scotland, and who himself suffered by it, is said to have patterned it after the Halifax Gibbet.[181:1] Guillotin's machine was not altogether original, but it owed more to the Italian "Mannaïa" than to the "Maiden." Nor, according to Sanson, the French headsman, was he the actual inventor of the notorious instrument guillotine, which bears his name. The guillotine was designed by one Schmidt, a German engineer and artificer of musical instruments. Guillotin enthusiastically adopted Schmidt's design, which he strongly recommended in the assembly, declaring that by it a culprit could not suffer, but only feel a slight freshness on the neck. Louis XVI was decapitated by the guillotine, as was the doctor, its sponsor and introducer. Strangulation, whether applied by the bowstring, cord, handkerchief, or drop, is as old as the hills. It was inflicted by the Greeks as an especially ignominious punishment. The "sus per coll." was not unknown in the penal law of the Romans, who were in the habit also of exposing the dead convict upon the gibbet, "as a comfortable sight to his friends and relations."