DUCK CREEK, a water-course of central Australia, is the largest of the channels which drain into the Darling (q.v.).
an apparatus at one time in use in Britain for the punishment of scolding wives. The ducking-stool grew out of the cucking-stool, which was not, as many have supposed, a mere difference of name for the same thing. The cucking-stool of itself did not admit of the ducking of its occupants. It was a simple chair in which the offender was placed, usually before her or his (for the cucking-stool was not so specially for women as the ducking-stool) own door, to be pelted and insulted by the mob. In conjunction with another instrument of however—the tumbrel —the cuckiug-stool was occasionally used for ducking; but the ducking-stool par excel lence was specially made for purposes of immersion. There were various examples of the ducking-stool. Sometimes it " consisted of a rough strong chair attached to one end of a beam, which worked on a pivot on a post bedded into the ground at the edge of the or the river, as the case might be. " The woman was placed in the chair with her arms drawn backwards; a bar was placed across her back and in front of her elbows;" another bar held her upright, and there were cords to tie her securely iu. The
executers of the punishment then took hold of a chain at the opposite end, and gave her a ducking on the," sec-saw" principle. A ducking-stool was in use'for actual duck ing at Leominster as recently as 1809. The beam to which the chair was attached was' 234 ft. in 'ength, the ducking being administered in the manner previously described. Other ducking-stools consisted of an upright and transverse beam, either movable or fixed, from which the chair was suspended by a rope or chain. The practice of ducking commenced in the latter part of the 15th c., and prevailed generally throughout the kingdom until the first part of the 18th c., and in isolated cases, as we have seen, even into the 19th century.
For the facts of this article we are indebted to a paper by Mr. Llewe]lynn Jewitt in the Reliquary. See also Chambers's Book of Days.