DUCKING, plunging in water, a diversion anciently practised among the Goths by way of exercise; but among the Celts, Franks, and ancient Germans, it was a sort of punishment for persons of scandalous lives.—At Marseilles and Bourbon their men and wo-
men of scandalous life are condemned to the cale, as they call it; that is, to be shut up naked to the shift in an iron cage fastened to the yard of a shallop, and ducked several times in the river. The same has been done at Thoulouse to blasphemers.