BABYLON AND PERSIA

l6oMEDIA, BABYLON, AND PERSIA.pccially when we consider what seems to our modernand uninitiated eyes the preposterous disproportionbetween offence and punishment. We can under¬stand the infliction of from five all the way to twohundred stripes for assault and battery, manslaughter,and premeditated homicide, according to the injurysuffered, from "drawing blood " to "a broken bone,"or " giving up the ghost," and think the punishmentjust, and even moderate ; we can understand a maxi¬mum of two hundred stripes for any act that defilessacred things, such as tilling land wherein a corpsehas been buried within the year, performing a sacri¬fice in a house where a man has just died, throwingon the ground a bone of a corpse, etc., because suchpollution was believed to affect the whole com¬munity, and to give power to the Evil Ones; butwhen we find the same punishment two hundredstripes awarded for giving bad food to a shepherd'sdog, we " feel uncomfortable,-" as Darmesteter says;and when it comes to five hundred stripes for killinga puppy-dog, six hundred for killing a stray dog,seven hundred for a house-dog, eight hundred for ashepherd's dog, one thousand for a hedge-hog, and tenthousand for' the mysterious "water-dog" (otter?),we give it up, and are fain to confess our incapabilityof identifying ourselves with all the workings of ourfar-away ancestors' minds. ''* A young Avestan scholar, Mr. A. V. Williams-Jackson (of Co¬lumbia College, New York), thus sums up tlie jnoper^attitude towardsall such special questions : " Tlie query as lo the 10,000 stripes I donot feel at all ceriain in answering. I had always held the view thatthe practice denoted in the Sraosho-Charatta was much the same ashas survived in the honors of the modern Persian bastinado, and that