454 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



nets in the water, but not on the land ; that it kills one man, and 

 leaves untouched another standing beside him ; that it can tear through 

 a house and enter the earth without moving a stone from its place ; 

 that it injures the heart of a tree, but not the bark ; that wine is poi- 

 soned by it, while poisons struck by it lose their venom ; that a man's 

 hair may be consumed by it, and the man be unhurt.* 



These peculiar phenomena, made much of by the allegorizing ser- 

 monizers of the day, were used in moral lessons from every pulpit. 

 Thus, the Carmelite, Matthias Farinator, of Vienna, who at the pope's 

 own instance compiled early in the fifteenth century that curious hand- 

 book of illustrative examples for preachers, the "Lumen Anima>," 

 finds a spiritual analogue for each of these anomalies.f 



This doctrine grew robust and noxious, until, in the fifteenth, six- 

 teenth, and seventeenth centuries, we find its bloom in a multitude of 

 treatises by the most learned of the Catholic and Protestant divines, 

 and its fruitage in the torture-chambers and on the scaffolds through- 

 out Christendom. At the Reformation period, and for nearly two 

 hundred years afterward, Catholics and Protestants vied with each 

 other in promoting this growth. John Eck, the great opponent of 

 Luther, gave to the world an annotated edition of Aristotle's " Phys- 

 ics," which was long authoritative in the German universities ; and, 

 though the text is free from this doctrine, the woodcut illustrating the 

 earth's atmosphere shows most vividly, among the clouds of mid-air, 

 the devils who there reign supreme. J 



Luther, in the other religious camp, supported the superstition 

 even more zealously, asserting at times his belief that the winds them- 

 selves are only good or evil spirits,* and declaring that he had himself 

 calmed more than twenty storms caused by the devil. | 



Just at the close of the same century, Catholics and Protestants 

 hailed alike the great work of Delrio. A In this the power of devils 

 over the elements is proved first from the Holy Scriptures, since, he 

 declares, " they show that Satan brought fire down from heaven to 

 consume the servants and flocks of Job, and that he stirred up a violent 

 wind, which overwhelmed in ruin the sons and daughters of Job at 

 their feasting " ; next, Delrio insists on the agreement of all the ortho- 

 dox Fathers that it was the devil himself who did this, and attention 

 is called to the fact that the hail with which the Egyptians were pun- 

 ished is expressly declared in Holy Scripture to have been brought 



* See, for lists of such admiranda, any of the early writers e. g., Vincent of Beauvais, 

 Reisch's " Margarita," or Eck's " Aristotle." 



f See the "Lumen Animae," Eichstadt, 1479. 



$ See Eck, "Aristotelis Meteorologica," Augsburg, 1519. 



* See his "Memoirs," iii, 172 (cited by Maury, "Legendes Pieuses," 18). 

 | See his " Memoirs," p. 190 (cited by Maury, as above, p. 18). 



A His " Disquisitiones Magica?," first printed at Lige in 1599-160C (in three vols. 

 4to), but reprinted again and again throughout the seventeenth century. 



