WISTARIA 



6339 



WITCHCRAFT 



WISTARIA 



WISTARIA, wista'ria, a beautiful flowering 

 vine of the pea family, named after Caspar 

 Wistar, an American physician. It is one of 

 the most magnificent climbers of the flower 

 garden, with graceful clusters of bluish-lavender 

 blooms, resem- 

 bling pea blos- 

 soms, drooping 

 from a screen of 

 foliage. The 

 Chinese species, 

 first introduced 

 into England in 

 1816, often has 

 flower clusters 

 three or four feet 

 in length, and 

 there is said to 

 have been one 

 plant of this spe- 

 cies whose 

 branches reached 

 a hundred feet on each side of the central 

 woody stalk; those of another covered nearly 

 a thousand square feet of wall space. Wistarias 

 grow in nearly all kinds of soil, and are propa- 

 gated by seeds and by cuttings. 



WIS'TER, OWEN (1860- ), an American 

 novelist, born at Philadelphia. He was edu- 

 cated in literature and law at Harvard Uni- 

 versity, was admitted to the bar in Philadel- 

 phia, but practically abandoned the profession 

 in 1891 to give his time to writing. He began 

 by contributing humorous verse and fiction to 

 magazines, but soon became interested in life 

 in what was then the unsettled West of the 

 United States Idaho, Nevada and neighboring 

 territory and wrote stories dealing with ad- 

 ventures on the prairies and about the gold and 

 silver mines. 



His first book, The Modern Svxss Family 

 Robinson, appeared in 1883, but his more 

 characteristic stories of Western pioneer life 

 began in 1896 with R<-<1 M<n and White, Lin 

 M< I.' <m, The Jimmy John BOM and The Vir- 

 ginian. This last mentioned book portrays one 

 <>t the most powerful pictures of frontier struggle 

 to be found in American literature, and it was 

 dramatized successfully. Wister has done some 

 valuable work in biography in his U. S. Grant, 

 Oliver U". ' // MM and /{ njannn Frank- 

 \\ In IP his collaboration with Grinnell and 

 Whitney in writing The Musk-Ox, Bison, Sheep 

 ami Goat Family in the American Sportsman's 

 Library was a real contribution t<> tin >nuly of 

 American animal life. Wister has not confined 



his fiction to Western themes, as his Lady 

 Baltimore, dealing with colonial days, and his 

 Philosophy 4, describing Harvard student life, 

 show; but undoubtedly his strongest work has 

 been that portraying life in the frontier settle- 

 ments. Later books from his pen are The 

 Seven Ages of Washington, Members of the 

 Family and The Pentecost of Calamity. 



WITCHCRAFT, wich'krajt. The term re- 

 fers to the general belief in and practice of 

 bewitchment by casting a spell, but more com- 

 monly to the special varieties of the belief and 

 the practices connected with it that arose under 

 Christian influence in Western Europe. The 

 belief in witchcraft is a generic reaction of the 

 primitive mind, which is ready to detect in the 

 incidents and accidents of life the workings of 

 spirits or demons and to believe in the posses- 

 sion of mystic powers by favored individuals. 

 The use of the power to inflict injury is witch- 

 craft. It may emanate directly from the indi- 

 vidual, as in the "evil eye;" but usually it re- 

 quires a proper ceremony or incantation to fix 

 the spell. The agency that makes the spell 

 work may be (and in developed forms of witch- 

 craft is generally) regarded as a spirit, or may 

 be vaguely conceived as part of the operations 

 of nature. 



The object through which the bewitchment 

 takes place is, if possible, a part of the person 

 of the victim the paring of his finger nails, a 

 lock of his hair, a bit of his clothing, or some 

 article which he has touched or used, but it 

 may be an object chosen to represent the 

 tim. By burning or piercing with thorns, or by 

 reciting a potent formula, using the victim's 

 name, the injury that is wished and acted will 

 be transferred to the bewitched person. Hence, 

 the widespread practice of destroying finger 

 nails, cuttings of hair, even scraps of food, so as 

 to prevent their being used as a means of 

 bewitchment; hence also the concealment of 

 tli<> true name and the use of another in or- 

 dinary intercourse. Bewitchment may extend 

 to cattle and crops; the blight may be cast 

 upon all one's possessions an.l ventures. The 

 i is naturally extended to a similar power, 

 however exercised, such as the power to raise 

 storms, to remove the crops, to transform men 

 into animals, to work miracles. 



In the special sense witchcraft implies the 

 cooperation or command of a spirit or demon. 

 bewitched person becomes possessed, and 

 tin- driving out of the demon is the act of exor- 

 cism. The existence of laws makum witchcraft 

 a crime shows how continuously the belief 



