THE COMPLETE ANGLER. 113 



physician,* tells us of a people that once a year turn wolves, 

 I partly in shape, and partly in conditions.f And so, whether this 



* Caspar Peucer was Melancthon's son-in-law, and editor of his works. 

 He was himself an eminent physician and naturalist, and wrote many medi- 

 cal works, with a treatise on monies, weights and measures. He suffered an 

 imprisonment of ten years, during which time he wrote his thoughts on 

 the margin of books with an ink made of burnt crusts and wine. He died 

 1602, aged 77. Walton quotes him througli Casaubon, and this whole 

 paragraph was added to the fifth edition.— i^rom several autJwrities, Am. 

 Ed. 



f Among the many strange delusions which have afflicted men, that of 

 supposing themselves transformed into brutes of various kinds, such as 

 horses {hippanthropy), dogs {cynanthropy), wolves {lycanthropy), or 

 others, has been so frequent as to give names to several forms of mania, 

 classed by Sauvages in his Nosology under the general head of Zoanthropy. 

 Raulin affirms that a whole cloister of nuns imagined themselves to be 

 cats, mewing, &-c., as such ; a few years since there might have been seen 

 in the Hospital of Bellevue near New York, a man w^ho fancied himself to 

 be a hog, and had attained singular skill in grunting as he rolled among the 

 straw of his cell ; and the punishment of Nebuchadnezzar (Daniel iv., 

 33), seems to have been a maniacal boanthropy, upon which many curious 

 conjectures have been made. 



It is remarkable that the wolf-man, Lycanthropos of the Greeks (See 

 Vossii Etymologia, 2G9, for Lucomanes), Loup-garou of the French, 

 Wiihr-wolf of the German, has been known from far antiquity down 

 to comparatively modern times. The reader will remember the story 

 of Lycaon, the son of Pelasgus, who was turned into a wclf by Jupi- 

 ter, because of his cannibal cruelty, the poetical version of which is 

 given by Ovid, Metamorphoses (L, 210, et seq.), and the prose by Pau- 

 sanias, Arcadica (viii., 2), said by Plato, Republica (viii., 15), to be a 

 myth showing the just fate of tyrants. Herodotus (iv., lOo) relates of the 

 J\'''-Airi, a savage people of Scythia, who, like their neighbors, the Budini, 

 liad a reputation for magic, that once in the year they changed themselves 

 into wolves, for a few days, which, says he, " I do not believe, though the 

 Scythians swear it to be true." Pomponius Mela (IL, 2, 125) repeats the 

 story, as does Solinus (xv., 3-G), though he attributes it to their destiny. 

 Virgil also, Bucolica (Eel., viii., 96-9), says of Mceris, the magical shep- 

 herd : 



Him oft I saw become a wolf, and roam 



Among the tangled forests far from home, 



And drag the mouldering dead from graves to share 



The loathsome food with his companions there. 



So Propertius (iv., 5, 13) speaks of the witch's power: 



