The horrible mutilations to which criminals were formerly subjected, originated in an endeavour to administer strictly even-handed justice. What could be fairer or more fit than to punish perjury by cutting off the two fingers which the perjurer had held up in taking the violated oath? It was a popular belief that the fingers of an undetected perjurer would grow out of the grave after death, seeking retributive amputation, as a plant seeks the light, and that his ghost would never rest until this penalty had been inflicted. (See Heinrich Roch: _Schles. Chron._, p. 267, where a case of this kind is recorded.) The Carolina (_constitutio criminalis Carolina_), although in many respects an advance on mediæval penal legislation, doomed incendiaries to be burned alive; and an old law, cited by Döpler (_Theat. Poen._, II. 271), condemned a man who had dug up and removed a boundary stone to be buried in the earth up to his neck and to have his head plowed off with a new plow, thus symbolizing in his own person the grave offence which he had committed. Ivan Basilovitch, a Muscovite prince, ordered that an ambassador, who did not uncover in his presence, should have his hat nailed to his head; and it is a feeble survival of the same idea of proper punishment that makes the American farmer nail the dead hawk to his barn-door, just as in former times it was customary to crucify highway robbers at cross-roads. According to an old Roman law ascribed to Numa Pompilius, the oxen which plowed up a boundary stone, as well as their driver, were sacrificed to Jupiter Terminus. In the early development of agriculture, and the transition from communal to personal property in land, this severe enactment was deemed necessary to the protection of the “sacra saxa,” by which the boundary lines of the fields were defined. Only by making the violation of enclosed ground a sacrilege was it possible to prevent encroachments upon it, so strong was the lingering prejudice against individual possessions of this kind running in the blood of a people descended from nomadic tribes of herdsmen, who regarded sedentary communities engaged in tilling the soil as their direst foes. The lawgiver knew very well that the oxen were involuntary agents, and that the plowman alone was culpable; but when a religious atonement is to be made and an angry god appeased, moral distinctions determining degrees of responsibility are uniformly ignored, and the innocent are doomed to suffer with the guilty. The oxen were tainted by the performance of an act, in which the exercise of their will was not involved, and must therefore be consigned to the offended deity. The same is true of the plowman, who did not escape immolation even when the _motio termini_ or displacement of the boundary stone occurred unintentionally.