EDMUND, a person well known in the literary world by his attachment to, and promotion of, agricultural knowledge: he was a native of Norfolk, a Quaker. His education was common, and he was apprenticed originally to a shopkeeper; his society was select in this situation, and by improving himself in learning, his conversation was enjoyed by a respectable acquaintance. He wrote many essays, poems, and letters, and some few controversial tracts. At length he settled, about his 40th year, at Bath in 1775, and was soon introduced to the most eminent literati of that place, among whom Dr Wilson and Mrs Macaulay highly esteemed him for his integrity and abilities. In 1777 he published Mentor's Letters, a moral work, which has run through many editions. But this year he gained great celebrity by his plan of an agricultural society, which was soon adopted by four counties. He still further advanced his fame by his papers in the Farmer's Magazine, and his communications in the Bath Society's papers; a work remarkable for its ingenuity and spirit. His last engagement was in the History of Somersetshire, where the topographical parochial surveys were his. This work, in 3 vols 4to, was published in 1791, by his colleague the Reverend Mr Collinson.—Mr Rack died of an asthma in February 1787, aged 52.

an engine of torture, furnished with pulleys, cords, &c., for extorting confession from criminals.—The trial by rack is utterly unknown to the law of England: though once, when the dukes of Exeter and Suffolk, and other ministers of Henry VI. had laid a design to introduce the civil law into this kingdom as the rule of government; for a beginning thereof they erected a rack for torture, which was called in derision the duke of Exeter's daughter, and still remains in the Tower of London, where it was occasionally used as an engine of state, not of law, more than once in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. But when, upon the assassination of Villiers duke of Buckingham, by Felton, it was proposed in the privy council to put the assassin to the rack in order to discover his accomplices; the judges, being consulted, declared unanimously, to their own honour and the honour of the English law, that no such proceeding was allowable by the laws of England. It seems astonishing that this usage of administering the torture should be said to arise from a tenderness to the lives of men; and yet this is the reason given for its introduction in the civil law, and its subsequent adoption by the French and other foreign nations, viz. because the laws cannot endure that any man should die upon the evidence of a false or even a single witness, and therefore contrived this method that innocence should manifest itself by a stout denial, or guilt by a plain confession; thus rating a man's virtue by the hardness of his constitution, and his guilt by the sensibility of his nerves. The marquis Beccaria, in an exquisite piece of raillery, has proposed this problem, with a gravity and precision that are truly mathematical: "The force of the muscles and the sensibility of the nerves of an innocent person being given; it is required to find the degree of pain necessary to make him confess himself guilty of a given crime." See Act of Faith, Inquisition, and Torture.

a spirituous liquor made by the Tartars of Tongula. This kind of rack is made of mare's milk, which is left to be four, and afterwards distilled twice or thrice between two earthen pots closely stopped; whence the liquor runs through a small wooden pipe. This liquor is more intoxicating than brandy distilled from wine.

or Arack. See ARACK.

To RACK Wines, &c. To draw them off from their lees, after having stood long enough to ebb and settle. Hence rack-vintage is frequently used for the second voyage our wine-merchants used to make into France for racked wines.