In 1741 a new press was made and fixed in the press-yard, for the punishment of a highwayman named Cook, but it was not used. The 12th Geo. III. (1772) at length altered the law on this head, and judgment was awarded against mutes as though convicted or they had confessed. In 1778 one so suffered at the Old Bailey. Finally, it was provided by the 7 and 8 Geo. IV., cap. 28, that the Court should enter a plea of “Not Guilty” when the prisoner will not plead. The principal forms of capital punishment, however, as the derivation of the expression implies, have dealt with the head as the most vulnerable part of the body. Death has been and still is most generally inflicted by decapitation and strangulation. The former, except in France, where it came to be universal, was the most aristocratic method; the latter was long applied only to criminals of the baser sort. Until the invention of the guillotine, culprits were beheaded by sword or axe, and were often cruelly mangled by a bungling executioner. It is asserted by the historian that the executioner pursued the Countess of Salisbury about the scaffold, aiming repeated blows at her, before he succeeded in striking off her head. This uncertainty in result was only ended by the ingenious invention of Dr. Guillotin, the rude germ of which existed long previously in the Scotch “maiden.” The regent Morton, who introduced this instrument into Scotland, and who himself suffered by it, is said to have taken it from the Halifax Gibbet.[118] Guillotin’s machine was not altogether original, but it owed more to the Italian “Mannaïa” than to the “maiden.” Nor, according to Sanson the French headsman, was he the actual inventor of the notorious instrument guillotine, which bears his name. The guillotine was designed by one Schmidt, a German engineer and artificer of musical instruments. Guillotin enthusiastically adopted Schmidt’s design, which he strongly recommended in the assembly, declaring that by it a culprit could not suffer, but would only feel a slight freshness on the neck. Louis XVI. was decapitated by the guillotine, as was the doctor, its sponsor and introducer. Strangulation, whether applied by the bowstring, cord, handkerchief, or drop, is as old as the hills. It was inflicted by the Greeks as an especially ignominious punishment. The “sus per coll.” was not unknown in the penal law of the Romans, who were in the habit also of exposing the dead convict upon the gibbet, “as a comfortable sight to his friends and relations.”