Seven grains of the substance, mixed with clarified butter, are then administered; if no evil symptoms follow during the day, at evening the accused is dismissed as innocent.[1185] A more recent authority describes a somewhat different form. A specified quantity of some deadly article, varying in amount with its activity, is mixed with thirty times its weight of _ghee_, or clarified butter. The patient takes this, standing with his face to the north, and if it produces no effect upon him while the bystanders can clap their hands five hundred times, he is pronounced innocent and antidotes are at once administered to him.[1186] A slight variation of this is recorded by a writer of the last century. After appropriate religious ceremonies, seven barleycorns of the deadly root _vishanaga_, or of arsenic, are mingled with thirty-two times its bulk of _ghee_, and eaten by the accused from the hand of a Brahman. If it produces no effect, he is acquitted.[1187] Much more humane was the custom described by Hiouen Thsang in the seventh century, when the experiment was performed vicariously on a bullock, even as a hen is used among the Niam-Niam of equatorial Africa. The animal was fed with poisoned food, and poison was likewise inserted in a wound made for the purpose in the right leg, while the fate of the accused was determined by the death or survival of the unlucky beast.[1188] Still another form in modern times seems to have been invented as a combination of the hot-water and poison ordeals. A _naga_ or cobra is dropped into a deep earthen pot along with a coin or ring, which the person on trial must remove with his hand. If he is bitten, he is condemned; if he escapes scathless, he is acquitted.[1189] CHAPTER XIV. IRREGULAR ORDEALS. The devout dependence upon Heaven, exhibited in the ordeal, did not exhaust itself on the forms of trial described above, but was manifested in various other expedients, sometimes adopted as legal processes, and sometimes merely the outcome of individual credulous piety. While therefore they cannot be regarded as forming part of the recognized institutions of Europe, still they illustrate too clearly the tendency of thought and belief to be entirely passed over.