Almost all seemed to have an intelligent idea of what to do. They had grasped the fact that the direct cause of fainting is diminished circulation of blood through the brain, and that, therefore, in trying to restore a person who has fainted, the first thing to be done is to alter that condition. The patient, they said, should be laid down quite flat, “so that the feebly-acting heart may not have to propel the blood upward, but horizontally”; tight clothing should then be loosened, cool fresh air admitted, cold water sprinkled down the face, volatile salts, or other stimulant vapours, held at intervals to the nostrils; and a little cold water, either by itself or having in it a teaspoonful or two of sal volatile, or the same quantity of spirits, being given as soon as the patient is able to swallow. =63. What public punishment was once in use in England for scolding women?= Women who made free use of their tongues were punished in an original way in old England. They were submitted to the correction of the ducking stool, a chair at the end of a plank which moved up and down over a river or pond—it was a sort of see-saw arrangement. The scold was fastened in the chair, the other end of the plank was lifted up, and down she went into the water, the number of immersions being in proportion to the vigour of her fiery tongue. It was an old institution: we find it mentioned in the Doomsday Survey. In the seventeenth century, the ducking stool was superseded, to a certain extent, by what was known as the branks. This was a scold’s bridle, the chief part of which entered the mouth and pressed upon the tongue, thus forming an effectual gag. “Ducking stools and branks, however,” one writer sadly remarks, “with all their terrors, seem to have been insufficient to frighten the shrews of former days out of their bad propensities.” =64. What was the origin of the phrase, “The wise fools of Gotham?”=