30 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



in the West Indian region, have commonly occurred over perhaps 

 most parts of the earth's surface, only the evidence has not been so 

 fully collected. Such oscillations have greatly affected the migra- 

 tions of animal and plant life, and have produced changes of cli- 

 mate. These physical changes are in themselves sufficient in a great 

 measure to account for the glacial phenomena of the Pleistocene 

 period. 



M'lTCHCRAFT lis BAVARIA. 



By Pkof. E. p. EVANS. 



^r^HE earliest recorded instance of the infliction of the death 

 -■- penalty for witchcraft in Bavaria occurred on June 18, 1090, 

 when the villagers of Volting seized three women suspected of 

 being in league with the devil, dragged them to the neighboring 

 town of Freising, and, after endeavoring in vain to extort from 

 them confessions of guilt by torture, burned them alive on the 

 banks of the Isar. Before being put to death, they were bound 

 hand and foot and thrown into the river, and the fact that they 

 sank and were nearly drowned ought to have been conclusive proof 

 of their innocence, but this result of the superstitious ordeal did not 

 accord with the wishes and fixed purpose of the fanatical mob 

 and was therefore repudiated. In the account of this extraordinarv 

 and cruel application of lynch law, contained in the contemporary 

 Annates St. Stephani F rising, and evidently written by a priest of 

 Weihenstephan, the unfortunate women are spoken of as martyrs 

 {martyrizatce sunt). It is also significant of the attitude of the 

 clergy at that time that the charred remains, after having been col- 

 lected by relatives, were buried in consecrated ground with religious 

 ceremonies, at which a priest and two monks officiated. Their con- 

 duct in this case was perfectly consistent with the views hitherto 

 officially promulgated by the Church. In the Canon Episcopi. 

 adopted by the ecclesiastical council of Ancyra in 900, the belief 

 in witchcraft is expressly declared to be a pagan delusion; and in 

 the so-called " Corrector," issued by Burkhard, Bishop of Worms, 

 about a century later as a guide for confessionalists, a year's pen- 

 ance is imposed upon any one who believes in the nocturnal assem- 

 blies and orgies known as the sabbat, or who holds that storms can 

 be produced, property appropriated and destroyed, or the minds of 

 men influenced and their dispositions changed by magic arts and 

 conjurations. Curiously enough, in the sixteenth and seventeenth 

 centuries papal inquisitors denounced and persecuted as heretics 

 all who did not believe these things. This strange transition from 



