Women have often been cruel mistresses to their slaves. A lady in Guiana, being envious of a very handsome mulatto slave, had her branded on the mouth, cheeks and forehead. In the case of another slave, who was also very beautiful, she had the tendon of Achilles cut thus causing her to become a deformed and crippled monster.[30] It is a notorious fact that Roman and Greek ladies often inflicted most terrible punishments on their slaves, and that it was more particularly towards the female slaves, the _ancillæ_, that the cruelty of their mistresses was shown. The Roman ladies, if, while they were having their hair dressed, they were vexed with their attendants, used to thrust pins into their arms and breasts. Darwin relates that at Rio Janeiro, an old lady possessed a kind of thumb screw which she had had made expressly to crush the fingers of her slaves. EPIDEMIC CRUELTY. During periods of great national excitement, such as revolutions, feminine cruelty shows how far it can go. The women, writes M. Du Camp, were the fiercest heroines of the Commune; it was a woman who incited the assassination of the Dominicans. When the hostages were shot, they surpassed the men in cruelty; they taunted them with not knowing how to kill. When employed to seek out the insurgents they were implacable; when acting as infirmarians, they killed the wounded by giving them brandy to drink. At the time of the French Revolution, on the days of execution, writes M. Legouvé,[31] the front rows nearest the guillotine were reserved for the women of the political clubs. They even hung on to the boards of the scaffold, in order the better to witness the death throes of the condemned, and drowned the cries of the victims by their peals of laughter. II. PITY. But again we find a series of contradictory facts, which bear witness that the sentiment of pity also is much keener in woman than in man. Even with animals, we observe this phenomenon. Hens often separate two young cocks who are fighting together. Sir George Le Grand Jacob has observed females of the wild goat (Steinbock) raise with their heads he-goats that had been shot, support them and help them to escape. Romanes relates, that sometimes the female gibbon, takes great care of all the members of the troop when they are wounded, even if they are not related.[32]