Upon the waters of the jealous Rhine The savage Celts their children cast, nor own Themselves as fathers till the power divine Of the chaste river shall the truth make known. Scarce breathed its first faint cry, the husband tears Away the new-born babe, and to the wave Commits it on his shield, nor for it cares Till the wife-judging stream the infant save, And prove himself the sire. All trembling lies The mother, racked with anguish, knowing well The truth, but forced to risk her cherished prize On the inconstant waters’ reckless swell.[869] The Teutonic tribes, anterior to their conversion, likewise exhibit the ordeal as a recognized resource in judicial proceedings. The Norræna branch, as we have seen, cultivated the _holm-gang_, or duel, with ardor, and they likewise employed the hot-water ordeal, besides a milder form peculiar to themselves entitled the _skirsla_, in which one of the parties to a suit could prove the truth of his oath by passing under a strip of turf raised so that it formed an arch with each end resting on the ground, the belief being that if he had forsworn himself the turf would fall on him as he passed beneath it.[870] The Germanic tribes, in their earliest jurisprudence, afford similar evidence of adherence to the customs of their eastern brethren. The most ancient extant recension of the Salic law may safely be assumed as coeval with the conversion of Clovis, as it is free from all allusions to Christian rules, such as appear in the later versions, and in this the trial by boiling water finds its place as a judicial process in regular use.[871] Among the Bavarians, the decree of Duke Tassilo in 772 condemns as a relic of pagan rites a custom named _stapfsaken_, used in cases of disputed debt, which is evidently a kind of ordeal from the formula employed, “Let us stretch forth our right hands to the just judgment of God!”[872] The Slavs equally bear witness to the ancestral practice of the ordeal as a judicial process. The _prauda jeliezo_, or hot-iron ordeal, was in use among them in early times.[873] In Bohemia, the laws of Brzetislas, promulgated in 1039, make no allusion to any other form of evidence in contested cases, while in Russia it was the final resort in all prosecutions for murder, theft, and false accusation.[874]