38 



♦ KNOWLEDGE 



[July 20, 1883. 



sometimes imposed by the gods as a punishment for impious 

 defiance and sin. 



Other causes, less remote, aided the spread of a belief to 

 which the mind was already inclined. Among these were 

 the hallucinations of men who believed themselves changed 

 into beasts, and who, retreating to caves and forests, issued 

 thence howling and foaming, ravening for blood and 

 slaughter ; hallucinations which afflicted not only single 

 persons, as in the case of Nebuchadnezzar, whose milder 

 monomania (he, himself, saying in the famous prize 

 poem : — 



"As he ate the unaccustomed food, 

 It may be wholesome, but it is not good,") 



rather resembled that of the daughters of Prsetus, who 

 believed themselves cows, but which also spread as virulent 

 epidemic among whole classes. It is related that, in 1600, 

 multitudes were attacked by the disease known as lycan- 

 thropy, or wolf-madness (from Greek, lukos, a wolf, and 

 anthropos, a man), and that they herded and hunted in 

 packs, destroying and eating cliildren, and keeping in their 

 mountain fastnesses a cannibal or devil's sabbath, like the 

 nocturnal meetings of witches and demons known as the 

 "Witches' Sabbath. Hundreds of them were executed on 

 their own confession, but some time elapsed before the 

 frightful epidemic, and the panic which it caused, passed 

 away. Besides such delusions, history down to our 

 own time records instances where a morbid, innate 

 craving for blood, leading sometimes to cannibalism, 

 has shown itself. Mr. Baring-Gould, in his " Book 

 of Werevolves," cites a case from Gall of a Dutch priest 

 who had such a desire to kill and to see killed that he 

 became chaplain to a regiment for the sake of witnessing 

 the slaughter in battle. But still more ghastly are the 

 notorious cases of Elizabeth, an Hungarian lady of title, 

 who inveigled girls into her castle and murdered them 

 that she might bathe her body in human blood to enhance 

 her beauty ; and of the Marechal de Retz who, cursed 

 with the abnormal desire to murder children, allured them 

 with promises of dainties into his kitchen, and killed them, 

 inhaling the odour of their blood with delight, and then 

 burned their bodies in the huge fireplace in the one room 

 devoted to these horrors. When the deed was done, the 

 Marechal would lie prostrate with grief, " would toss 

 weeping and praying on a bed, or recite fervent prayers 

 and litanies on his knees, only to rise with irresistible 

 craving to repeat the crime." 



Such instances as the foregoing, whether of delusion or 

 morbid desire to destroy, are among secondary causes ; 

 they may contribute, but they do not create, being inade- 

 quate to account for the world-wide existence of trans- 

 formation myths. The animals which are the supposed 

 subject of these vary with the habitat, but are always 

 those which have inspired most dread from their ferocity. 

 In Abyssinia we find the man-hya>na ; in South Africa, 

 the man-lion ; in India, the man-tiger ; in Northern 

 Europe, the man-bear ; and in other parts of Europe the 

 man-wolf, or were-wolf (from A.-S. iver, a man). 



Among the many survivals of primitive thought in the 

 Greek mythology, which are the only key to its coarser 

 features, this of belief in transformation occurs, and, indeed, 

 along the whole line of human development it appears and 

 re-appears in forms more or less vivid and tragic. The 

 gods of the South, as of the North, came down in the like- 

 ness of beasts and birds, as well as of men, and among the 

 references to these myths in classic writers, Ovid, in the 

 " Metamorphoses," tells the story of Zeus visiting Lykaon, 

 king of Arcadia, who placed a dish of human flesh before 

 the god to test therebv his omnisicence. Zeus detected 



the trick, and punished the king by changing him into a 

 wolf, so that his desire might be towards the food which he 

 had impiously offered to his god. 



" In vain he attempted to speak ; from that very instant 

 His jaw9 were bespluttered with foam, and only he thirsted 

 For blood, as he raged amongst flocks and panted for slaughter. 

 His vesture was changed into hair, his limbs became crooked. 

 A wolf— he retains yet large traces of his ancient expression. 

 Hoary he is as afore, his countenance rabid, 

 His eyes glitter savagely still, the pictui'e of fury." 



But we may pass from this and such-like tales of the 

 ancients to the grim realities of the belief in mediaeval 

 times. 



LAWS OF BRIGHTNESS. 



VI. 



By Richard A. Proctor. 



ZOLLNER, as I have said, regards the full moon as 

 though she were a nearly flat disc under full solar 

 illumination. He estimates the brightness of the full moon 



at of the sun's, and, comparing surfaces, he makes 



619,600 > ' f o 



the sun's brightness equal to 618,000 times the moon's. Now, 



it is easy to determine what would be the brightness of the 



full moon supposing the surface perfectly reflective (not 



specularly) and smooth, and regarding it as a flat disc. 



Such a disc, placed where the moon is, would be illuminated 



by a sun about 32' in diameter, since the sun appears as 



large seen from the moon as seen from the earth. Now, 



such a sun would occupy a part of the whole heavenly 



vers . 10' 

 sphere represented by the proportion — . — ! . or 



0000054. But the brightness of such a disc, sup- 

 posed to be illuminated by both halves of a com- 

 plete enclosing sphere of solar brightness, would be 

 the same as the sun's brightness. Now, different parts 

 of such enclosing sphere would illuminate the disc 

 at diflerent angles, and, therefore, we must not consider 

 the mere area of the sphere. Thus, the portion P, Fig. 1 3, 

 of such a sphere (the radius may be any whatever) would 

 illuminate D obliquely, and with an eflect reduced from 



what would result if the illumination were direct, in the 

 proportion of the sine of arc P K to unity. But it is 

 obvious that the little area p, which is the orthogonal pro- 

 jection of P on K L (the plane of D), bears just this pro- 

 portion to P. Hence the illuminating eflect of the area P 

 may be represented by the area p, and the total illumi- 

 nating eflect of the hemisphere will be represented by the 

 area of the circle K L. Thus, for the whole sphere, we 

 get twice the area K L, instead of the area of the sphere 

 (which is four times this circle). Thus, the actual illumi- 

 nation of the supposed disc placed where the full moon is, 

 bears to solar brightness the ratio of area S (representing 



