Quite recently in China fifteen wooden idols were tried and condemned to decapitation for having caused the death of a man of high military rank. On complaint of the family of the deceased the viceroy residing at Fouchow ordered the culprits to be taken out of the temple and brought before the criminal court of that city, which after due process of law sentenced them to have their heads severed from their bodies and then to be thrown into a pond. The execution is reported to have taken place in the presence of a large concourse of approving spectators and “amid the loud execrations of the masses,” who seem in their excitement to have “lost their heads” as well as the hapless deities. When the Russian prince Dimitri, the son of Ivan II., was assassinated on May 15, 1591, at Uglich, his place of exile, the great bell of that town rang the signal of insurrection. For this serious political offence the bell was sentenced to perpetual banishment in Siberia, and conveyed with other exiles to Tobolsk. After a long period of solitary confinement it was partially purged of its iniquity by conjuration and re-consecration and suspended in the tower of a church in the Siberian capital; but not until 1892 was it fully pardoned and restored to its original place in Uglich. A like sentence was imposed by a Russian tribunal on a butting ram in the latter half of the seventeenth century. Mathias Abele von Lilienberg, in his _Metamorphosis Telae Judiciariae_, of which the eighth edition was published at Nuremberg in 1712, states that a drummer’s dog in an Austrian garrison town bit a member of the municipal council in the right leg. The drummer was sued for damages, but refused to be responsible for the snappish cur and delivered it over to the arm of justice. Thereupon he was released, and the dog sentenced to one year’s incarceration in the Narrenkötterlein, a sort of pillory or iron cage standing on the market-place, in which blasphemers, evil-livers, rowdies and other peace-breakers were commonly confined. [The Narrenkötterlein, Narrenköderl or Kotter formerly on the chief public squares in Vienna are described as “Menschenkäfige mit Gittern von Eisen und Holz, bestimmt das darin versperrte Individuum dem Spotte des Pöbels preiszugeben (zu narren).” Schläger: _Wiener Skizzen aus dem Mittelalter_, II. 245.] Mornacius also relates that several mad dogs, which attacked and tore in pieces a Franciscan novice in 1610, were “by sentence and decree of the court put to death.” It is surely reasonable enough that mad dogs should be killed; the remarkable feature of the case is that they should be formally tried and convicted as murderers by a legal tribunal, and that no account should have been taken of their rabies as an extenuating circumstance or ground of acquittal. In such a case the plea of insanity would certainly seem to be naturally suggested and perfectly valid.