RECENT RECRUDESCENCE OF SUPERSTITION. 79 



prevalence of gross superstition in the communities where they 

 are practiced. The first and strongest impulse of the European 

 peasant even in the most enlightened countries is to ascribe all 

 extraordinary good or evil fortune to diabolical agencies. If a 

 man's hens lay more eggs, or his cows give more milk, or his fields 

 yield better crops than those of his neighbors, the latter are pretty 

 sure to attribute his prosperity to witchcraft. Pliny records a 

 case of this kind in which the freedman C. Furius Cresinus was 

 summoned to appear before the sedile Spurius Albinus on the 

 charge of sorcery, because he raised richer harvests on his small 

 farm than others did on their large estates. In his defense he 

 pointed to his well-fed slaves, his superior agricultural imple- 

 ments, and his fat oxen, and exclaimed: "These, O Quirites, are 

 some of my magic arts ; but my night- waking and continuous 

 toil I can not show you here on the forum ! " Curiously enough, 

 in the early part of the last century precisely the same accusation 

 was brought against a woman who cultivated her own land at 

 Bischofswerder, in w^est Prussia; and again in November, 1893, 

 at Dresden, a shoemaker named Liebscher instituted a suit against 

 a miner and small innkeeper named Timmel to recover damages 

 for defamation of a like character. Both parties lived in the vil- 

 lage of Miidisdorf, not far from Freiberg. It seems that Lieb- 

 scher's hens and cows supplied him abundantly with eggs and 

 milk, whereas Timmel's were remarkably unproductive. Lieb- 

 scher was then charged with practicing sorcery, and thereby 

 transferring the eggs and milk from Timmel's poultry and kine 

 to his own. As this report was diligently circulated by the de- 

 fendant and believed by the great majority of the inhabitants of 

 Miidisdorf and of the surrounding country, it naturally proved to 

 be very injurious to the reputation and the business of the shoe- 

 maker, who appears to have been a man of intelligence far supe- 

 rior to that of his neighbors. The testimony taken at the trial 

 revealed the startling fact that nine tenths of the population of 

 this mining district, although good Protestants, hold firmly to 

 the belief in witchcraft and the reality of satanic compacts. 



In the summer of 1874 a woman named Frenzel, living at 

 Trulben, in the Bavarian palatinate, consulted a famous wizard at 

 Ixheim, near Zweibrlicken, in order to ascertain who had be- 

 witched her child that he should have fallen sick. The wizard 

 placed a key in an open Bible and told Frau Frenzel to lay her 

 finger on it and then to repeat the names of all the people in 

 Trulben. No sooner had she mentioned Margaret Klein than the 

 key turned over. "That is the witch," exclaimed the wizard, 

 who also learned through the movements of the key that she had 

 acquired her knowledge of the magic art from her grandmother, 

 and had the power of transforming herself into a cat or dog at 



