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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 Me. Hewabd 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. 



The Bishop 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 as a 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 bad 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, 



