The date of the trial was fixed by the judge, but it had to be within six months of the filing of the affidavit. This time was allowed in order to enable the plaintiff to procure his witnesses in the event of their being absent from home. The appointment of the judges, or at least of some of them, was vested in the crown; whether they were paid or not is a matter of doubt. Sometimes judgeships were hereditary. But whether judges received fees or not they appear to have been regarded as professional men and retained their title even after they had ceased to exercise their judicial functions. The supreme judge was the king himself, to whom cases of primary importance were occasionally referred, while the principal officers of state often acted as judges. The following crimes were capital offences, though the precise form in which the death sentence was to be carried out is not always quite clear:—a false accusation of witchcraft; perjury on the part of a witness in a capital case; burglary of a temple, palace, or private house; kidnapping a free-born child; highway robbery; theft of the goods of a man whose house is on fire; adultery; various forms of incest; rape of a betrothed maiden; persuading a slave to flee from his master, or being an accessory after the fact by harbouring him; various forms of theft and fraud; and building a house so badly that it collapsed and thereby killed the owner. The penalty of death appears to have been inflicted either by burning, impalement, dismemberment, or drowning. Criminal offences of a less serious character were treated differently. Among the penalties enumerated in the code, mutilation, branding and scourging are the most barbarous. Mutilation was a punishment based logically on the “eye for an eye,” and “tooth for a tooth” principle, its application being primarily to those who had mutilated their neighbour. But its application was extended to cover other forms of crime or offences adjudged in those days as crimes, thus insolence on the part of an adopted child to his foster-parents was effectually stopped by the removal of the child’s tongue; while an adopted son who is unduly inquisitive into the origin of his birth has his eye plucked out; lastly—and what perhaps to us seems the most amazing of all—if a surgeon performed an operation and the patient died through any carelessness or lack of skill on his part, the surgeon’s hands were amputated—a law which must have considerably cooled the ardour of any of the surgeons of those days particularly addicted to the use of the knife. Branding was the outward and visible sign (usually imprinted on the arm) of degradation to slavery,—the punishment for slandering a votary or a married woman. Scourging was the penalty for striking a superior; the scourging was to be performed in public, the strokes numbering sixty, and the implement used a cow-hide whip; while banishment from the city was the very fitting and meet punishment for incest. 2. _RELIGION_