5°6 
Witchcraft, Insanity, and Crime. [September, 
men (and beasts ?), may affedt the living either for good or 
evil. These views, indeed, are by no means accepted by 
Dr. Beard. He speaks of Spiritualism, Animal Magnetism, 
and Mind Reading as delusions which have been welcomed 
in Europe after having been “ exposed and shorn of their 
force in America.” Or again, speaking of the accusers of 
the alleged Salem witches, he says — “ Out of such a circle 
as this developed the spirit-rapping excitement at Rochester, 
which was the modern evolution of witchcraft known as 
Spiritualism : in such circles the Eddy Brothers, in my 
presence, recently raised the dead, and Katie King appeared 
in human form. If this Salem circle of afflidted children 
had possessed the rapping power with joints that the Fox 
girls possessed ; if they could have read muscle like ‘ Brown 
the mind-reader ’ and his disciples ; if they could have 
achieved any of the slate-writing tricks of modern mediums, 
their power for evil would have been titanic.” But this very 
reaction against the possibly too-sweeping scepticism of the 
first half of the present century, which Dr. Beard here de- 
nounces, is a reason for a thoroughly scientific study of the 
subject. Until such study has been completed witchcraft 
must continue to have more than a mere historical signifi- 
cance. This being, however, admitted, I must presume to 
differ from Dr. Beard on some points not without importance. 
He attaches to the New England witch-mania of 1692, and 
its deplorable cruelties and murders, an importance which 
they can scarcely claim. He tells us that “ the twenty vic- 
tims of the Salem judicial massacres were nearly the last of 
the immense army of murdered witches ” ; that “ England 
in 1692 would not have executed twenty of her citizens for 
witchcraft ” ; that “it was the last adt in the long tragedy 
of terror and blood”; and that the “ erroneous belief” in 
sorcery “ starving for want of pasture in Europe ” expe- 
rienced in New England a transient recovery. Dr. Beard 
here pays Europe too high a compliment. If the testimony 
of Dr. Parr is to be believed,* two witches were executed at 
Northampton in 1705, and in 1712 — twenty years after the 
Salem tragedy — five more suffered capitally at the same 
puritanical town. In Scotland a vidtim was put to death in 
1722. The sub-prioress of a nunneryt suffered execution by 
fire at Wurzburg in 1749 ; and one Anna Goldi perished at 
the stake at Glarus, in Switzerland, as recently as 1781 — the 
horrors of mediaeval ignorance thus almost blending with 
those of revolutionary enlightenment ! 
* Buckle, History of Civilisation, i. , p. 333. 
f Horst, Zauberbibliothek. 
