40 SPITZKA— OBSERVATIONS REGARDING INFLICTION [April 23 



military offenses. To the credit of William Perm and his compan- 

 ions it may be recorded that in 1675, when they founded Pennsyl- 

 vania, the statutes prescribing death for all sorts of offenses, grave 

 and trivial, were left behind in darkest England with its Newgate 

 and London Tower, and the only one retained was that of death for 

 aggravated cases of murder. 



Electrocution. 



In the childhood of the human race lightning and thunder played 

 an important part in the religion and the mental life of the various 

 peoples. Jupiter ruled the world by his thunderbolts. The Norse 

 god Thor with mighty arm wielded the hammer of lightning in 

 combat with the enemies of the gods. Every ancient race and tribe 

 has been awed into hvimble submission before the powerful divinities 

 imagined to preside among the clouds by this fascinating phenome- 

 non of nature. It is even yet feared by man, for is not its dead- 

 liness and its destructiveness demonstrated on every hand? 



It is now more than a century and a half ago that Benjamin 

 Franklin, accompanied by his son, went to a field in the neighbor- 

 hood of Philadelphia as a thunder-storm was approaching and by 

 his famous kite experiment discovered that lightning was, as he 

 shrewdly had surmised, in all respects similar to the frictional elec- 

 tricity which man had produced artificially. In 1760 Franklin 

 erected the first lightning rod upon the house of a merchant named 

 West. Although more than five hundred persons are killed and 

 over eight hundred are injured annually in the United States, 

 Franklin's invention, wherever used, has saved countless lives and 

 vast amounts of property. . That the sage Franklin ever foresaw 

 the likelihood of employing this death-dealing and mysterious force 

 in the infliction of capital punishment is apparently not on record. 



Electrocution (more properly electrothanasia), compounded from 

 " electro-execution," is the popular name for the infliction of the 

 death penalty by passing through the body of the condemned a cur- 

 rent of electricity of sufficient intensity to cause death. The method 

 was first adopted by New York State in 1888 by a law which became 

 effective on January i, 1889, and which provides how many persons 

 may witness the execution, that a post-mortem examination of the 



