In some of the Scottish islands it is the custom to beach a boat, from which a fisherman had been drowned, cursing it for its misdeed and letting it dry and fall to pieces in the sun. The boat is guilty of manslaughter and must no longer be permitted to sail the sea with innocent craft. Scotch law does not seem to have recognized deodand in the strictly etymological sense of the term, but only escheat, in other words, the confiscated objects were not necessarily applied to pious purposes--_pro anima regis et omnium fidelium defunctorum_--but were simply forfeited to the king or to the state. This form of confiscation never prevailed so generally in Central and Eastern, as in Western Europe. Some German communities and territorial sovereigns introduced it from France, but so modified the practical application of the principle as to award to the injured party the greater portion, in Lüneburg, for example, two-thirds of the value of the confiscated animal or object. (_Vide_ Kraut’s _Stadtrecht von Lüneburg_, No. XCVII. Cited by Von Amira, p. 594.) Blackstone’s theories of the origin of deodands are exceedingly vague and unsatisfactory. Evidently the learned author of the _Commentaries_ could give no consistent explanation of these vestiges of ancient criminal legislation. His statement that they were intended to punish the owner of the forfeited property for his negligence, and his further assertion that they were “designed, in the blind days of popery, as an expiation for the souls of such as were snatched away by sudden death,” are equally incorrect. In most cases the owner was perfectly innocent and very frequently was himself the victim of the accident. He suffered only incidentally from a penalty imposed for a wholly different purpose, just as a slaveholder incurs loss when his human chattel commits murder and is hanged for it. The primal object was to atone for the taking of life in accordance with certain crude conceptions of retribution. Under hierarchical governments the prominent idea was to appease the wrath of God, who otherwise might visit mankind with famine and pestilence and divers retaliatory scourges. For the same reason the property of a suicide was deodand. Thus the wife and children of the deceased, who may be supposed to have already suffered most from the fatal act, were subjected to additional punishment for it by being robbed of their rightful inheritance. Yet this was by no means the intention of the lawmakers, who simply wished to prescribe an adequate atonement for a grievous offence, and in seeking to accomplish this main purpose, ignored the effect of their action upon the fortunes of the heirs or deemed it a matter of minor consideration.