The Koran holds every beast and fowl accountable for injuries done to each other, but reserves their punishment for the life to come. Among the Kukis, if a man falls from a tree and is killed, it is the sacred duty of the next of kin to fell the tree, and cut it up and scatter the chips abroad. The spirit of the tree was supposed to have caused the mishap, and the blood of the slain was not thought to be thoroughly avenged until the offending object had been effaced from the earth. A survival of this notion was the custom of burning heretics and flinging their ashes to the four winds or casting them upon rivers running into the sea. The laws of Drakôn and Erechtheus required weapons and all other objects, by which a person had lost his life, to be publicly condemned and thrown beyond the Athenian boundaries. This sentence of banishment, then regarded as one of the severest that could be inflicted, was pronounced upon a sword, which had killed a priest, the wielder of the same being unknown; and also upon a bust of the elegiac poet Theognis, which had fallen on a man and caused his death. Even in cases which, one would think, might be regarded as justifiable homicide in self-defence, no such ground of exculpation seems to have been admitted. Thus the statue erected by the Athenians in honour of the famous athlete, Nikôn of Thasos, was assailed by his envious foes and pushed from its pedestal. In falling it crushed one of its assailants, and was therefore brought before the proper tribunal and sentenced to be cast into the sea. Judicial proceedings of this kind were called ἄψῦχων δίκαι (prosecutions of lifeless things) and were conducted before the Athenian law-court known as the Prytaneion; they are alluded to by Æschines, Pausanias, Demosthenes, and other writers, and briefly described in the _Onomasticon_ of Julius Pollux and the _Lexicon Decem Oratorum Graecorum_ of Valerius Harpokration.