This use of torture, secret and unavowed, for the purposes of the prosecution, prevailed until a recent date. Disgusted English officers vainly sought to check the pernicious practice, which was common throughout India among all sects and classes, though strictly forbidden by law. According to one authority, “The poor practise torture on each other, robbers on their victims; masters upon their servants; zemindars on their ryots; schoolmasters on their pupils; husbands on their wives and even parents on their children.” “The very plays of the populace,” says another, “excite the laughter of many a rural audience by the exhibition of revenue squeezed out of a defaulter, coin by coin, through the appliance of familiar provocatives.” Some of these as employed by the old police consisted of such devices as filling the nose and ears of a prisoner with cayenne pepper, checking the circulation of the blood with tight ligaments, suspending a person head downward in a well and sometimes immersing the whole body in deep water until insensibility but not actual drowning was caused. Other processes are recounted by Dr. Cheevers. Torture by heat consisted in applying to the naked flesh a lighted torch, burning charcoal or red hot tongs, or by pouring boiling oil into the ears or nose. Torture by cold was inflicted by exposure of the victim naked in the night air and constantly sprinkling the body with freezing water. Other methods were: suspension by the ears, wrists, feet, hair or moustache, generally accompanied by severe beating with rods, wet stinging nettles, bunches of thorns, or cudgels of split bamboo; confinement in a cell containing quicklime; rubbing the face on the ground so that the nose was wounded, the lips torn and the upper jaw fractured; fastening offensive and gnawing insects under cover upon the skin; sticking pins under the nails; beating the ankles and other joints with a soft mallet. The bull’s hide torture showed devilish ingenuity. The victim was sewed up in a newly flayed skin and exposed to the torrid sun. The outer covering contracted with the heat, drawing the live flesh with it, and the poor agonised creature died gradually of hunger, thirst and putrifaction. Milder tortures, as they were deemed, existed, in which the punishment was more gradual but not less acute. Roasting by exposure to sun or fire, running up and down or “walking about,” a process in which relays of policemen keep a culprit on the move for hours and hours together, so that, after a night’s unbroken promenade, the craving for rest and sleep becomes intolerable, especially with people accustomed to sleep for twelve or fourteen hours at a stretch. The prolonged use of the stocks was at one time very general in Bengal, sometimes with the limbs enclosed in small apertures too tight for them, or when the victim lay on his back with his feet raised high in the air for a period of twenty-four hours.