158 Witches’ Brooms. 
mental diseases may be observed, and many harmless imbeciles are 
now cared for there who would have been tortured to death in 
former times. The witches’ brooms, too, have lost their glamour, 
and are now traced to an insignificant gall-mite or a microscopic 
fungus. And the imps, the green man, the familiars, and the 
others :— 
“These our actors 
as I foretold you were all spirits, and 
are melted into air, into thin air.” 
[In the discussion that followed the reading of the paper Mz. Hewarp BELL 
said that the late parish clerk of Seend, who died a few years ago, an old man 
of 83, remembered as a boy an old woman being tied in the way that they used 
to tie witches and thrown into the stream in the village, and it was only by the 
timely arrival of Lord Frederick Seymour, who lived near, that the old lady was 
saved from being drowned. That happened almost within living memory, as the 
old man only died five years ago, and had often told him (Mr. Bell) the story 
himself. 
Ture BisHor remarked that from his own experience the belief in these 
superstitions bad not died out. He had reason to think that formerly the belief 
in those powers was shared by those who were reputed to practise them as well 
as by those who persecuted others, and that while some used those influences 
benevolently, they were also often the cloak for murders and other evil designs. 
The great problem was how to put an end to that kind of superstition and cruelty. 
No doubt there was a great revival of that form of belief. If they read the 
spiritualistic journals common enough in some parts of England, and especially 
in Yorkshire, they would see the revival of these superstitions in a gross form. 
The best way of treating them, perhaps, was to leave them alone. From time 
to time they saw people brought into the police courts for pretending to have 
powers they did not possess, and they were very properly fined and punished. 
If at one time a large number of people took to those nightly excursions referred 
to, though no doubt many of them were not on brooms—(laughter)—the result 
must have been demoralising, and something had to be done to check it. In the 
same way they in the present day had to consider whether they would not be obliged 
to face the revival in question. As he had already intimated, the best way, 
perhaps, was to treat it as foolish and worthless and denounce it in every possible 
way asa superstition and pretence. When those things got ahead they were rather 
difficult to deal with. He could not think that their forefathers who treated 
those things so seriously were so utterly mistaken as it was sometimes the 
fashion of this century to suppose. He had read a good many of the trials 
alluded to, and there was certainly evidence, he thought, that those persons were 
guilty of distinct crimes as well as of pretending to have powers they did not 
possess. He dared say Dr. Straton, with his larger researches, would be able to — 
confirm that view. He (the Bishop) had no doubt at all it would take very 
little to revive both the belief and the cruelty of those practices. He was 
talking the other day to a Dorset farmer who thoroughly believed in witchcraft, 
