This oath signified that the object by which the individual swore would bring ruin upon him in case he committed perjury. The oath, therefore, came to be a fixed and definitely prescribed means of judicial procedure, though this occurred only after deity cult effected a union of the two factors, cult and magic. Nevertheless, the beginnings of this development are to be found as early as the totemic age, and they approximate to the cult-oath particularly in those regions that practise ancestor worship. The Bantu, for example, swears by the head of his father or the cap of his mother, as well as by the colour of his ox. In all these cases, the intention is that the perjurer shall suffer the vengeance which the demon of the deceased or of the animal visits upon him who swears falsely. Closely related in its motives to the oath is another legal institution, the _ordeal_. In the earliest form of the ordeal, the strife of individuals was settled by a duel. Such an ordeal was very similar to the sword-oath, at least among Indo-Germanic peoples. Just as the man who swore by his weapons invoked death by their agency in the indefinite future, so each of the participants in the duel sought to bring these magical powers into immediate effect in the case of his opponent. Not to him whose arm is the stronger, but to him who has the stronger cause, will the gods grant victory through the magic of his weapon. Like the oath, therefore, the ordeal was originally a method of legal procedure in civil cases. Like the oath, furthermore, it was, in its beginnings, a means whereby individuals settled their controversies independently of a judge. It is at this point that the punitive action of individuals gives way to public legal procedure. Originally, crimes against life and property were dealt with by individuals; the endeavour to secure the judgment of the gods by means of the duel was doubtless one of the earliest steps by which the penal process became a public procedure, and the punishment itself, therefore, became raised above the plane of mere revenge. Blood revenge involved an unexpected attack in the open or from ambush. To renounce this custom in favour of the duel, therefore, was in harmony with the character of the heroic age. For this was the period in which the ideal of manly honour was rapidly gaining strength, and in which, therefore, it was regarded as unworthy under any circumstances to take the life of a defenceless man. The principle accepted as self-evident in war, namely, that the person attacked have an opportunity to defend himself, became, in a warlike age, a maxim applying also to times of peace. Moreover, even though it be true of the ordeal as of the oath that, at the outset, cult was secondary to magical conjuration, nevertheless, the dominance of the latter varied with the degree in which the State freed penal justice from the passion for revenge on the part of individuals. The ordeal thus came to be more than merely a