_Capital punishment, by beheading_ was not practiced by the ancient Israelites, but was a custom of the Egyptians, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks and Romans,[3] and the French. We find that the “chief baker,” who incurred Pharoah’s ill-will, was accordingly decapitated;[4] John the Baptist lost his head on the order of Herod;[5] James the Apostle suffered a similar fate,[6] and many other of the early martyrs were beheaded.[7] _Burning_ to death was of pre-Mosaic authority, for we find that when it was reported to Judah that his daughter-in-law Tamar, was with child and had played the harlot, Judah said, “Bring her forth and let her be burnt.”[8] This was the punishment inflicted upon a priest’s daughter, under the Sinaitic law, for fornication,[9] and was also the form of punishment for incest with a wife’s mother.[10] _Drowning_ was a form of capital punishment in vogue among the ancient Babylonians, the Jews and the Romans and more recently among the French, English and Americans, during the witch craze in the seventeenth century.[11] Even before the witch craze, in England, in which death by burning and drowning was the usual mode of ending the lives of the poor unfortunates, accused of this hated and unprovable crime, there were precedents for the use of drowning, as a punishment, in that country. During the reign of Edward II. felons were put to death by drowning, for we find that in the sixth year of the reign of that monarch, the jury for the hundred of Cornylo, in Kent, exhibited a presentment to Hervi de Stanton, and his associate justices itinerant, sitting at Canterbury, in the Octaves of St. John the Baptist, importing, that the Prior of the Christ-church in Canterbury, did, about eleven years then past, divert the course of a certain stream, called Cestling, in which such felons as were condemned, to death, within the before-mentioned hundred, ought to suffer judgment by drowning.[12] Drowning was regarded as an especially appropriate punishment for women in Scotland, at an early day and according to Dr. Hill Burton, in 1624, eleven gipsy women were sentenced to be drowned in the North Loch, of Edinburgh, in the hollow where the Princess street Garden is now located.[13] In 1685 two women, Margaret M’Lauchlan, a widow, and Margaret Wilson, a young girl, of eighteen, were drowned at Wigtownshire, for their religious belief. They were bound to stakes where the swift tide of the Solway overflows twice a day. After a partial unconsciousness, the young girl was revived and was urged by her friends to say “God save the King.” She refused and as the waters closed over her for the last time, she gasped: “I am Christ’s.” And thus she gained a place in history, as a martyr to her belief, and her young life was forfeited as a penalty for having incurred the religious and political bigotry of a despotic monarch.[14]