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THE TRANSIT OF CIVILIZATION.

CHAPTER THE FIRST.

MENTAL OUTFIT OF THE EARLY COLONISTS.

I.

The first English-Americans.

What are loosely spoken of as national characteristics are probably a result not so much of heredity as of controlling traditions. Seminal ideas received in childhood, standards of feeling and thinking and living handed down from one overlapping generation to another, make the man English or French or German in the rudimentary outfit of his mind. A gradual change in fundamental notions produces the difference between the character of a nation at an early epoch and that of the same people in a later age. In taking account of the mental furniture which the early English emigrants carried aboard ship with them, we shall gain a knowledge of what may be called the original investment from which has been developed Anglo-Saxon culture in America. The mother country of the United States was England in the first half of the seventeenth century, or, at most, England before the Revolution of 1688. From the English spoken in the days of the Stuart kings came

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our primitive speech, and the opinions, prejudices, and modes of thinking of the English in that day lay at the bottom of what intellectual life there was in the colonies. Some seventeenth-century characteristics, long since lost or obscured in England, may yet be recognized in the folk-lore and folk-speech, the superstitions and beliefs of people in America. The number of English who crossed the seas before the middle of the century was above thirty thousand. Those who survived the first rude outset of pioneer life, with their fast-multiplying progeny, numbered probably fifty thousand in 1650, and this population was about halved between the colonies on the Chesapeake waters and those to the northward of the Dutch settlement on the New England coast. To these early comers it is due that the speech, the usages, the institutions, and the binding traditions of the United States are English.

II.

Milton and Shakespeare.

In reckoning the mental outfit of the first comers we should only mislead ourselves by recalling the names of Jonson and Shakespeare and the other lights that were shining when the Susan Constant and her two little consorts sailed out of the Thames to bear a company of English people to the James River. Nor will it avail much to remember that Milton was a Puritan at the same time with Cotton and Hooker and Winthrop. The emigrants had no considerable part in the

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higher intellectual life of the age; the great artistic passions of Shakespeare and Milton touched them not at any point. Bacon’s contribution to the art of finding truth did not belong to them. Men may live in the same time without being intellectual contemporaries.

III.

The Copernican system.

The science that touched the popular imagination in the seventeenth century was astronomy. “God gave to man an upright face that he might view the stars and learn astronomy,” according to a couplet of the time.[1] As then accepted astronomy was a jumble of the prevalent Ptolemaic theory of the universe with the world at the center, and of the odds and ends of mediæval astrology —moon-signs, zodiac-signs, horoscopes, ominous eclipses followed by devastating fires, and comets presaging disaster and the death of princes, with the mystical doctrine of the dominance of planets over plants, minerals, and diseases. The Copernican system, which essayed to displace the “firm-set earth” from that central position in the universe it had so long occupied, made headway slowly. In the interval between the landing of the Jamestown gold hunters and that of the Plymouth Pilgrims, the great Kepler, working in obscurity, developed the three principles which are the foundations of modern astronomy. It was two years before the beginning of the Plymouth settlement that, in poverty and neglect, he wrote: “Farewell,

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Ptolemy! I am turning back to Aristarchus under the lead of Copernicus”;[1] and in the loneliness of his convictions he said in the same year, “My book may well wait a hundred years for a reader, since God himself for six thousand years awaited a discoverer.”[2] After Virginia and New England were securely settled, Galileo was imprisoned for demonstrating the earth’s motion regardless of the time-honored opinion of Joshua the son of Nun and the indubitable witness of everybody’s senses.[3] As the middle of the century approached, one finds Copernicanism spoken of as “the theory that has so stirred all our modern wits.”[4] In strictly orthodox circles, in good society, and among the people generally, the sun, the moon, the planets, and the fixed stars continued to revolve round the earth as aforetime to lighten the paths of men or at least to twinkle on them, to lord it over plants and animals, to indicate the nature of diseases, and to foretell to the expert the fortunes of the future.[5] The rhetoric of colonial preachers still turned the universe of fiery lights about the solid earth. In 1666 and afterward one may read between the lines in the non-committal writings of some Harvard mathematicians a possible preference for Copernicanism. Throughout the century the English-American colonists with a few exceptions rested undisturbed in the notion that the center of universal motion was the earth, and that the heavenly bodies were imponderable flames hung up for the convenience of man.

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IV.

Astrology.

The interest in astronomy was mainly practical; the stars were thought to exert a controlling influence on human affairs. Kepler himself lived in part by casting horoscopes for princes, as Tycho had done before him; it is by such scullion work that the world in every age contrives to degrade its superior men and dissipate their energies. John Winthrop, the younger, Governor of Connecticut, a fellow of the Royal Society and a man of much learning, as learning was then understood, possessed some of the works on astrology so much esteemed at that time. Among these is a book with astrological figures set one on each page with the lower half of the page blank.[1] These diagrams are for every four minutes of time, and by means of them “any reasonable artist” in such things “may give judgment of a question.” On one page some reasonable artist has essayed to find out, by casting a horoscope, what was the ailment afflicting one Alice Wilkins in 1656.[2] Medicines were administered when the moon was in the proper sign, and the almanacs of the eighteenth century told the farmer to cut his brushwood in certain signs of the zodiac and in the decrease of the moon, that it might not grow again, but to cut firewood in the increase. Timber to last must be cut in the last quarter of the moon. So Tusser, in his Points of Good Husbandry, says, “The moon in the wane gather fruit for to last.”[3] The Rev. Jared Elliot,

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the leading colonial writer on agriculture in the middle of the eighteenth century, shows great respect to the zodiac, and the prosperity of the Pennsylvania German was attributed to his regard for the moon’s phases. In many regions to-day the moon rules the planting of potatoes, the cutting of hair, and the killing of pigs; and women wean their infants in the proper sign of the zodiac. These are the ragged remnants of the ancient and complicated science of astrology which survived from the middle ages, and which with much other strange baggage of the sort crossed the wide seas with the emigrants to America.[1]

V.

Comets and other portents.

Most people knew little of the complicated mysteries of horoscopes, and they understood less of the jargon of astrology. But the unlearned kept pace with the learned in looking with religious dread upon comets. “Experience Attests and reason Asserts that they have served for sad Prologues to tragical Epilogues.”[2] The words are those of perhaps the earliest American writer on astronomy; the opinion was that of the world at large in his time.[3] On the science of prognostication by comets learned men disagreed. “Some,” says the writer we have just quoted, “put much trust or vertue in the tail, terming it the Ignomon.”[4] Naturally enough a comet “operated most powerfully” on the people to whom it was “vertical”

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—that is to say, over whose heads the body of it passed. Some thought that comets were themselves agents of mischief, drying up the moisture of Nature and thus producing droughts and pestilential fevers, and inflaming the anger of princes; as they were supposed to be in combustion they excited the air to tempests, and thus raised great waves and inundated the earth.[1] The winds driven into caves, and by some means imprisoned in the earth, made the ground quake in their endeavors to get out, said the astrologers. Others believed that they were but a sort of celestial weather signal hung out to give warning of the imminence of calamities ordained by God.[2] Yet others believed that, in the phrase of the time, they were “both effectual and significant.”[3] It was noted in New England that when John Cotton, the great ecclesiastical luminary of the first generation, drew near his end, a comet appeared which “went out” soon after the preacher’s death.[4] The blight of 1665, that put an end to the hope of prosperity from wheat-raising in Massachusetts, was heralded by “a great and blazing comet,” which, like all portents and omens, lacked definiteness, for it was “accompanied with many sad effects” beside.[5] John Hull, the pine-tree shilling-maker, calls the attention of a correspondent to the comet of 1680 with a pious ejaculation of alarm: “The Lord fit us and you for all his will and pleasure.”[6] A protagonist of Puritanism in its decline was Increase Mather. He was a pessimist with a keen relish

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for the supernatural and sensational. Nothing delighted him more than calamities past, present, or potential. The brilliant comet of 1680 was a call from heaven for a man of his genius; he re-enforced it by a sermon entitled “Heaven’s Alarm to the World.”[1] When two years later another blazing star burst upon a world that had not yet had time to recover its equanimity, Mather proceeded to expound this also in “The Latter Sign Discoursed of,” and then followed these with a book, for which he borrowed the title “Kometographia.”[2] In this the accidents by land and sea, the disasters of pestilence, famine, war, and assassination, that had ever come trailing after any comet, were once more rehearsed, as they had been rehearsed in other times by other sensational moralists. The notable comet of 1680, which set so many watchdogs baying at the sky, alarmed the Dutch dwellers on the upper Hudson, as we may see in a letter dispatched by their usual post, an Indian runner, to New York. In this they mention the “Dreadful comett starr” “with a very fyery Tail or Streemer.”[3] “Undoubtedly God threatens us,” is their inference, and they crave permission of superior authority in New York to cause “the Domine” to proclaim in the church “a day of fasting and humiliation.”[4]

On the eve of Bacon’s rebellion in Virginia, in 1676, the people were warned, to no good purpose apparently, by signs in the heavens, in the air, and out of the earth. To a comet “streaming like a

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horse taile westwards” there was added “fflights of pigeons in breadth nigh a quarter of the midhemisphere, and of their length was no visible end.”[1] This ought to have been enough to frighten even the easy-going Virginians of that time out of their sins, but comet and pigeons were re-enforced by a third omen—strange swarms of flies “rising out of spigot holes in the earth”; no doubt what are now known as the seventeen-year locusts.[2] [3] Not only comets, but eclipses, parhelia, or “multiplied suns,” and other unusual phenomena were beheld with awe.[4] In auroras the colonists saw swords of flame brandished, and fiery horsemen charging in ghostly battle. There was always the chance that a particularly brilliant display of northern lights might prove an awful forerunner, not of war and famine, but of the combustion of the earth and the crack of doom itself.[5] Rainbows, on the other hand, were recorded with a “Laus Deo.” The people of Boston were comforted by a rainbow after the unlucky outcome of an expedition against Port Royal in 1707, but nothing else came of it. The rainbow which raised all hopes at the outset of an expedition, in 1711, also played Boston false.[6]

VI.

Spontaneous generation.

From Greek and Roman antiquity down at least to the middle of the seventeenth century no scientific proposition was more universally received than that insects and some birds, fishes, and

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reptiles were generated by putrefaction, or, to turn the proposition round, that all putrefaction produced life. From the bodies of decaying horses came hornets; but kine in decomposition produced honeybees. Ovid says that this was known by experience, and later writers quoted his verses on the subject and saved themselves the necessity of observation. The practical bee-keeper of the seventeenth century did not read the classics, or Gesner or Mouffet, or any of the other innumerable Latin treatises on animal life, but he did look into his hive occasionally, and he knew that a bee came from a “little worm” in the comb. Bees taken from England to Virginia and New England prospered. But the traveler Josselyn entertained the hope that, when the carnivorous animals should have been exterminated, American bees might be produced from dead bullocks, after the approved scientific formula.[1] Some kinds of wasps had their origin in the decay of apples and pears; the most superficial observer might find them to his sorrow issuing from the fruit. Minnows were produced from foam, carp came from putrid slime, the oyster, the nautilus, and other shellfish from different kinds of putrescence mixed sometimes with mud, sometimes combined with the sand of the sea bottom.[2] So far did Nature carry this economy that even the discarded tails of New England tadpoles were not suffered to go to waste: out of them were formed the water newts, as Josselyn takes pains to explain. Lord Bacon, who flounders

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like a stranded leviathan when he seeks to explore the coasts of physical science, suggests that toads come from the corruption of water mixed with mud; to “old snow” he attributes the generation of those red larvæ or “worms” which are yet believed by the unlearned to have “snowed down.”[1] A chemist of that day, whose work was reprinted by the Royal Society, says of fermenting bread dough that “unless it were bridled and restrained by . . . Artificial Fire it would proceed to vitality and produce worms.”[2] It was held in Elizabeth’s time, and long before and after, that parasites were bred from the body on which they lived. As late as 1676, when Bacon, the Virginia rebel, in his last illness found himself obliged to cast his discarded garments directly into the fire, the presence of the parasites was thought to be one of the results of his disease and a divine judgment on him for rebellion, though the case is sufficiently explained by the fact that he had been dwelling in Indian wigwams a few weeks before.[3] The persistence of vitality was held then as the persistence of force is now; “no one living creature corrupts without the production of another,” was an accepted maxim.[4] Lord Bacon states it more cautiously: “Briefly, most things putrefied bring forth insects of various names.”[5]

VII.

Migration of birds.

If there was much lack of book learning in the generation of English people that sprung up first

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on American soil, there was some gain in a life in which exigent wants compelled a habit of shrewd observation. For centuries strange theories had prevailed among learned and unlearned regarding the origin of those far-wandering waterfowl whose distant resting places were yet undiscovered. Following the analogy of the accepted theory regarding the production of “insects,” including frogs, mice, and snakes, there were those who derived many birds from wood rotting in the water, or from decaying fruits. Others said that some birds grew on trees, and proved it by showing the shells of the nuts from which the bird had emerged. The so-called barnacle goose had been held for centuries to develop from the shellfish barnacle which clings to the bottom of a ship or a water-soaked timber. More than one writer of standing testified to the metamorphosis on the evidence of his own senses, at least he had found a barnacle all befeathered and ready to take flight.[1] Easy-going casuists treated the barnacle goose as a fish by virtue of its marine origin, and it was served up to monks and other self-indulgent fasters on Fridays. Such a myth could not be long held in solution by American tradition; barnacle geese were not found, and the unlearned pioneer seeking his meat by prowling along the reedy shores of rivers, ponds, and estuaries with a great fowling piece six or seven feet long in the barrel came to know the life habits of waterfowl better than any of that procession of philosophers who with pedantic learning copied

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incredibilities from one Latin book to another down the ages. One bit of ornithology of that time crossed the seas, and perhaps by virtue of its absurdity was able to hold its own in America for two hundred years. The annual disappearance of migratory birds and their return in the spring demanded explanation, and in old British folk-lore it was held that such birds were accustomed to lie hid in caves, rocks, and hollow trees.[1] In Corn-wall it was reported that swallows out of season had been “found sitting in old deepe Tynneworkes and holes in the Sea Cliffes.”[2] Olaus Magnus, a banished Scandinavian bishop living at Rome, published in the sixteenth century a work learned in form but as full of things unbelievable as the writings of the much-venerated Pliny. He told on the never-to-be-questioned authority of fisher-men that they had drawn up torpid swallows in their nets which came to life on warming. He even gave all the details of their taking refuge for the winter in the clay at the bottom of the river.[3] Once this fond story of the fishermen got itself printed in Latin and authenticated by a bishop, it became a scientific fact. The new notion almost crowded out the old folk-theory of hibernation in caves and holes, and held its own for two centuries, to be reluctantly discarded almost in our time.[4] The revelations of the telescope made the moon seem near, and Bishop Godwin formed a new theory of hibernation in the satellites, which was elaborated by Charles Morton, an Oxford scholar,[5][6]

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whose old age was passed in Massachusetts. He preached a sermon from a text in Jeremiah, from which he deduced a winter home for all kinds of migratory birds among the newly revealed mountains and valleys of the moon. If that were thought too far away for wing travel, Morton was willing to split the difference by suggesting that the earth might have some smaller satellites—little undiscovered gull islands in the heavens for the birds to roost upon. After Morton’s death, omnivorous and marvel-loving Cotton Mather appropriated this hypothesis as a piece of flotsam, and wrote a letter to the Royal Society in which he suggested that the prodigious flights of pigeons in the colonies rendered probable the existence of an unseen, near-at-hand satellite, from which came these myriads of birds, and to which they were wont to retreat again. But the English colonists who touched elbows with Nature, and had larger opportunities for observation than their island ancestors, came to accept the annual migration of the disappearing birds before the middle of the eighteenth century. There were, however, learned pundits in Philadelphia as late as 1800, who followed Olaus in wintering their swallows in the bottoms of the rivers.

VIII.

Other phases of thought regarding animals and plants.

Classification, which is at once the result of knowledge and an instrument of investigation, was infantile and unstable even among the learned.

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Fishes, including, of course, sea mammals, had been divided into round and long; to these Harrison adds shelled fishes and legged fishes.[1] Popular classification is always rough, but in that day nobody held firmly to the cardinal division of the vertebrate animals. The beaver and otter were even divided transversely in classification; their hind quarters were counted with the fishes.[2] In ecclesiastical regulations it was not always thought worth while to make two bites of a beaver; Lorrainers and Savoyards, as well as Canadian woodsmen, ate freely of his flesh on fish days, making sure that the meat of so aquatic an animal with so flat a tail could not be flesh.[3] The interest in animal life was unscientific, being mainly an interest in the marvelous stories of the basilisk hatched from a cock’s egg brooded by a toad,[4] of the unicorn with a horn eight or ten feet long growing out of his head, of the salamander that endured the fire,[5] of the phœnix that lived five hundred years, of the common hare that changed sex in alternate years, of men that were metamorphosed into wolves in Ireland, of wolves that struck men dumb by seeing them first, of swans that sing before dying, and so on and on. Wonders were not wanting among American animals; the unicorn was observed on the Hudson, and many half-human creatures, reported by early voyagers, dwelt along the seacoast from Cape Ann eastward.[6] Sometimes these were seen. at night dancing in groups about a fire on the shore;[7] one daring Triton swimming in Casco Bay

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made bold to grasp the side of a canoe and got his hand lopped off with a hatchet.[1] Narrating these occurrences, Josselyn meditates that “there are many stranger things in the world than are to be seen between London and Stanes.” We are accustomed to see popular credulity controlled by scientific skepticism, but in the seventeenth century the learned looked for scientific knowledge primarily in the writings of the ancients, sacred and profane, and devoured most of the atrocious stories accumulated by Pliny, “the greatest gull of antiquity.” When modern light began to dawn and science tried to observe, it was not mainly the ordinary and the regular that were noted; members of the new Royal Society and others thought to learn from the monstrosities and marvels; New England ministers acted as soothsayers and expounded the hidden meaning of monstrous births, and even played showmen to exhibit these ghastly messages from the Almighty.[2]

IX.

The world invisible.

The world invisible as conceived in every age is a reflection of the familiar material world; the image is often inverted: it may be exaggerated, glorified, distorted, but it is still their own old world mirrored in the clouds of heaven. Even the love of rank and ostentation in the seventeenth century—the snobbery of the age—projected itself into heavenly arrangements. In a day when idle

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serving men stood about the halls of a country gentleman merely to lend dignity to the master, when one no greater than a high sheriff thought it unfit to perform his functions without a squad of liveried retainers at his heels, when a bishop in Christian humility rode about with sometimes a hundred and fifty horsemen clanking after him, and when kingly state was multitudinous in proportion, the majesty of Almighty God required myriads of attendants. Milton thinks thus of God:[1]

And the prose of Bishop Hall is almost as lofty as Milton’s verse, when it contemplates “those next-to-infinite numbers of mighty and majestical spirits, wherewith the great God of heaven hath furnished his throne and footstool.”[2] Human arithmetic had no terms by which to tell the number of those who “are numerable only to God who made them.”[3] The uncountable angels were employed in keeping the universe in motion,[4] as many eminent writers knew partly by intuition, but also by metaphysical demonstration.[5] The busy angels turned round the crystalline spheres from the outer primum mobile, just this side the immovable abode of God, to the nethermost of all that carried the moon about in her lagging revolutions.[6] Besides this duty of keeping the lights of heaven burning and turning, “these mighty

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angels” produced those “strange concussations of the earth” which are so alarming and “direfull prodigies in the skie,” about which it was not deemed safe to speculate. Hall relates that one philosopher was stricken dead for venturing to reason about thunderstorms.[1] It was angelic agency that caused a corpse, in that believing age, to bleed when touched by the guilty hand of the murderer.[2] Angels gave warnings and revelations by dreams, by mental impressions and by apparitions; and they even fought for men against the spirits of the underworld. Of such stuff as this the great Puritan poet wrought the splendid fabric of his epic. To contemporary readers Paradise Lost had as much of history as of poetry. It was an imaginative rendering of the picturesque mythology of the seventeenth century, a mythology destined to grow dim in the gray morning light of the critical century that followed.

X.

The evil angels.

The American settlers lived in a different world from that which they had left in England, and their conceptions of the invisible could not escape modification. Far removed from the ostentatious conventions of the old civilization, the minds of the colonists could no longer form vivid pictures of heavenly retinues.[3] One finds few allusions to angelic agency in their writings; thunderbolts which Bishop Hall, “the English Seneca,” as he

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was called, ascribes to good angels, Cotton Mather, the New England Seneca, will have to be the work of devils; on this hypothesis he easily explains the disproportionate number of churches that suffered from lightning. The popular belief of the time in the active meddling of evil spirits was not weakened by a life passed in coast settlements, between a wide and wild sea and an impenetrable forest filled with beasts and devil-worshipers.[1] Diabolical disturbances occurred rather early in all the colonies, and they were particularly rife in New England, where the imagination was set on edge by theological speculation.[3] In 1637 Jane Hawkins, the Boston midwife and dispenser of quackery oil of mandrakes, was diligently examined on suspicion of familiarity with the devil. Eight years later a man from Virginia, reported to have skill in necromancy, was “blown up” in Boston Harbor, and strange to say it was accounted a marvel that he could never afterward be found.[4] Yet more diabolical was it that men in fiery shapes, or “fire in the shape of men,” walked the water near where the ship had exploded.[5] In the settlement on the Connecticut devils were particularly active. Hartford, Stratford, Fairfield, and New Haven had witch trials, and in some instances the ordeal of swimming the witch to see whether she could float was resorted to.[6] Springfield was accounted “infamous by reason of the witches there,” as the traveler Josselyn tells us.[7] More than one Long Island town had its shallows

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stirred by witchcraft accusations.[1] Boston brought its first witch to trial in 1648, and in 1656 the wife of one of the magistrates was “hanged for a witch only for having more wit than her neighbors,” as was said at the time.[2] In 1654 a shipmaster sailing with emigrants to Maryland encountered two months of stormy weather, such weather as only “the malevolence of witches” could get up. The crew selected a little old woman of suitable appearance, one Mary Lee, whom they examined “with strictest scrutiny, guilty or not guilty.” The poor old body was hanged “out of hand,” and all her possessions were huddled into the sea with her, but the hungry tempest would not be quieted by the hideous sacrifice[3]. There were sporadic witch excitements sooner or later in nearly every colony; miniature reflections of what was passing at the time in Europe.[4]

XI.

Witchcraft.

The ancient belief in witchcraft, though never extinct, passed through a sort of renascence in the religious excitements of the sixteenth century. As early as 1548 newborn Protestant zeal against superstition began to attack all kinds of sorcery, and there was also opposition to various popular superstitions in Catholic countries.[5] The charms by which women sought to mitigate the sorrows of childbearing were special subjects of ecclesiastical inquisition in England in the first year of Elizabeth’s reign.[6] The tendency of this was to make a

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witch of every midwife and wise woman who encouraged her patients by little quackeries.[1] The trial of a supposed witch by weighing her wizened form in the balances against the huge church Bible bound in heavy boards with metal clasps, or by tying her thumbs and her toes together crosswise to see whether she would float when put into the water, attracted a concourse of people and spread abroad the horrible superstition. “Swimming witches” became a favorite amusement of the brutal populace. “Our Countrey people,” says an English writer in 1718, “are still as fond of it as they are of Baiting a Bear or a Bull.”[2] [3] The notoriety and outcry served for a sort of devil’s advertisement; the afflicted were everywhere set to brooding on the probability that some malicious neighbor or some doted old woman of uncanny aspect had laid them under a spell.[4] The attempt to put down witchery by the infliction of the death penalty served to breed new alarms, new accusations, and fresh executions. In the time of the civil war and the Commonwealth there were infectious witch panics in England. In Essex and Sussex alone two hundred persons were prosecuted for witchcraft, and half of them were executed.[5] Medical skill was dangerous in a time of suspicion. Meric Casaubon saw a clever woman doctor driven from a town because she had benefited a lunatic patient. It was evident to the populace that nothing less than sorcery could relieve a demoniac. In 1646 James Howell wrote:[6] “There have been

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more witches Arraign’d and Executed heer lately than ever were in this Island since the Creation.” “All the tribunals of Christian Europe resounded with such condemnations,” says Voltaire of this period.[1] The poor Turks had never a witch or demoniac among them, a proof positive that their religion was false; the devil sparing his own. It was estimated, on the other hand, that the judges of Christian lands had sent more than a hundred thousand people to death on the gallows or at the stake for the crime of witchcraft.

XII.

Descended from hobgoblins.

The classic dignity of Milton’s evil angels, when marshaled “in battailous aspect,” is the work of the poet. The sprites of popular fancy in that age were groveling and grotesque. They made silly contracts with doting crones whom they persuaded to write their names with their own blood in a book, and that without any valuable consideration; they held burlesque religious exercises and dug up dead men’s bones to enchant with. They were of the sort that masqueraded as dogs and cats, and hares and toads. They haunted houses for the mere fun of terrifying the inmates; they took possession of hysterical people and talked nonsense from their lips, and they tangled the manes of horses in the night for mere wanton deviltry. The antipathies of these demons were equally incomprehensible. They could be frightened away by

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hanging up lucky stones with natural holes in them, or discarded horseshoes, or better still by burying “witch-jugs” full of horseshoe nails under a threshold, or by the hanging up of fresh bays about a house.[1] [2] They were sometimes known to the witches who were their familiars by such names as Pluck, Vinegar Tom, Catch, Hard-name, Jarmara, Elemauzer, Pyewacket, Peckin-the-Crown, and Smack.[3] Sprites like these are not primarily the offspring of theological speculation; they resemble the gnomes, trolls, and brownies, the Hudekins, Robin Goodfellows, and Friar Rushs of the tales and ballads.[4] They have floated down from ancient heathen times on the stream of nursery and fireside folk-lore.[5] But they had ceased to be regarded with awed amusement as were their progenitors the gnomes and fairies. They had come to be denounced from pulpits and accused of grewsome and horrible acts suited to their new position as Christian devils.

XIII.

Realism of devils.

This grotesque superstition could not be disentangled from the creed of the time. Jurists like the astute Coke and the conscientious Sir Matthew Hale, and even such philosophers as Lord Bacon and Sir Thomas Browne, were helpless to rid themselves of it.[6] It was part of what we may call the fixed intellect of the age. The people who first saw on the stage Shakespeare’s “secret, black,

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and midnight hags” were no doubt touched with a ghastlier horror than the æsthetic shudder this apparition affords in later times, for the diabolical dance of witches concocting infernal spells had then the force of daring realism.[1] “That there are evill spirits,” says Bishop Hall, “is no lesse certaine then that there are men. . . . That evill spirits have given certaine proofes of their presence with men, both in visible apparitions and in the possessions of places and bodies, is no lesse manifest then that we have soules.”[2] But God had “bound up the evill Angels in chaises of darknesse.” This was to restrain them from frightening God’s “weake creatures” by “those frequent and horrible appearances which they would otherwise make.” It was God’s pleasure sometimes to “loosen or lengthen” the chains and permit these diabolonians “to exhibit themselves under some assumed shapes unto men,” which gives the eminent casuist occasion to discuss “what our deportment should be “when a devil whose chain has been temporarily slackened “exhibits” himself to us. This very materialistic conception of the devils in chains like mastiffs is not peculiar to Hall. It was a trait of thought at the time. It occurs more than once in Increase Mather, as “the Lord doth sometimes lengthen the chain which the infernal lions are bound fast in,” and so on.[3] In the trials at Salem we repeatedly come upon the expression in a grossly literal sense.[4]

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XIV.

Haunted houses.

The notion of house-haunting demons—a superstition the most nearly a survival from the days of the elves and brownies—crossed the sea with the early emigrants. One such spirit in Newbury in New Hampshire, in 1679, threw sticks and stones on the roof of the house, lifted up the bedstead from the floor, threw the bedstaff out the window, threw a cat at the mistress of the house and beat the goodman over the head with a broom, made the pole on which the kettles were hung to dance up and down in the chimney, tossed a potlid into the fire, set a chair in the middle of the table when dinner was served, seasoned the victuals with ashes, filled a pair of shoes with hot ashes, ran away with an inkhorn, threw a ladder against a door, and put an awl into the bed. It played a hundred other lively pranks until “it pleased God to shorten the chain of this wicked demon.” While the chain was shortening the disheartened demon was heard to cry six times over, “Alas! me knock no more!”[1] In Hartford, in 1683, there was a gentle devil with a taste for flinging corncobs through the windows and down the chimney. Stones and sticks were sometimes thrown, but softly so as to do no serious harm. When the occupant of the haunted house returned to its owner a chest of clothes unjustly detained, no more corncobs were thrown. In Portsmouth it rained stones outdoors and in at the house of George Walton, and, what is curious,

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some of these stones were hot. Glass windows were shattered, and a stirrup iron traveled off on its own motion without horse or rider and was never again seen. Sometimes a hollow whistling sound was heard. This whistling devil amused himself like a true brownie by hanging the haycocks up in the trees and decorating the kitchen “all up and down” with wisps of hay. Sometimes the chains were sufficiently lengthened for a New England demon to become visible.[1] One appeared as a “black-a-moor child,” another as a woman clad in green safeguard, short blue cloak, and white cap. Once the black cat, so dear to tradition, appeared and was shot at; again the head of a man was seen swimming through the water, followed a little way off by. the tail of a white cat.[2] These American devils with their undiabolical sense of humor have at least a family likeness to the mischievous elves, pucks, brownies, and other “tricksy sprites” with which the English imagination peopled lonesome glens and the dark corners of their houses in primitive times. Whether the later demons were creatures of excited fancy or of imposture, or both, they were cast in molds supplied by ancient tradition.

XV.

Demoniacal possession.

The phenomena known in later times as hysteria, and as mesmerism and hypnotism, were not yet recognized to be due to natural causes. The infinitely delicate shadings by which mental sanity

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passes without any line of demarcation into madness could not then be imagined. A belief in demoniacal possession was almost unavoidable. That men and women might be “obsessed with cacodemons,” in the pedantic phrase of the time, had the sanction of the ages, of religion, and of science itself.[1] Only the most hardy intellects ventured to question an opinion so well supported.

In the Massachusetts town of Groton, in 1671, occurred a case of well-defined hysteria. The village minister naturally concluded that the violent contortions and “ravings” of the patient, Elizabeth Knap, “represented a dark resemblance to hellish torments.” When in one of her fits she cried out, “What cheer, old man?” to whom could she be speaking if not to the devil? Like many other hysterical sufferers, she was susceptible to hypnotic suggestion, and in answer to leading questions she was able to remember having made the compact with Satan always presupposed in such cases. This in saner moments she retracted, as she did also accusations of witchcraft made against others in reply to probing inquiries. She once described to the shuddering bystanders a witch visible to her at that moment, having a dog’s body and a woman’s head, running through the room and climbing up the chimney. Good Parson Willard and others present found all this so exciting that they, though unable to see the apparition, could detect the imprint of a dog’s foot in the clay daubing of the chimney.[2]

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XVI.

Agency of religious fervor.

Worst element of all in this delusion was the mistaken zeal of the clergy. Ministers of differing creeds agreed in believing that the palpable evidences of spiritual existence afforded by witchcraft might serve to vanquish the ever-present skepticism regarding the supernatural. Squalid tales gathered at witch trials, many of them foul and revolting as well as unbelievable, were disseminated as religious reading, in hope that they might prove a means of grace by revulsion. If any man had the courage to question the supernatural character of these disgusting apparitions, he found himself gazetted in the authoritative writings of eminent divines as a Sadducee, a patron of witches, and a witch advocate; if he took a neutral position for safety, averring the existence of witchcraft but denying the possibility of proving it in particular cases, he was dubbed a “nullibist.”[1] This in America as well as in England. A new case of witchcraft did not excite pity, but something like exultation; the Sadducees were again confounded. The Puritan ram’s horn of Increase Mather answered across the seas to the bugle of Glanvill, chaplain in ordinary to Charles II, and late in the century the good Richard Baxter himself re-echoed Cotton Mather’s shout of victory amid the horrors of the judicial massacre at Salem. Reports of continental witch trials were translated for the edification of Englishmen. By this array of frightful diabolism it was

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hoped that the swelling tide of gross immorality might be checked and religion promoted, for the appeal of religion in that day was to fear rather than to aspiration; the peril of trying to kindle altar fires with embers from hell was not understood.

XVII.

The Salem witchcraft.

Salem village, an outlying suburb, two or three miles from Salem proper, was almost a frontier town in 1692. Men still wore buckskin breeches and hats with a brim narrow in front and long behind. Wolves, bears, and catamounts were trapped. Some of the settlers had participated in the desperate battle at the Narragansetts’ town sixteen years before. The sword and the rapier were still worn at the side, the fowling piece six and seven feet in length was in use. Men had been killed by the Indians in the bounds of Salem within three years. Education was generally neglected; even men of substance were sometimes unable to write. The old patriarchs who had made the settlement had just died off; the community had lost its steadfast guides. New clergymen had come in and new magistrates, not with the education of England, but with the scantier training of New England—a training in which the felling axe was more important than the Latin grammar. The new clergy, men of the second and third generations, were, with a few exceptions, profoundly impressed with the necessity of believing

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anything ghostly or horrible; the supernatural was the basis of their piety. Increase Mather, the bishop by brevet of New England, had published books on the ominous eclipses of 1680 and 1682, and another in 1686 on Illustrious Providences, which was a storehouse of those dragons’ teeth that bore such ample fruit in 1692. His abler but less judicious son, Cotton, had issued a book on “Memorable Providences relating to witchcraft and Possessions.” It had come to a second edition in the very year before the horrors of Salem.

The village of Salem had the elements needed for a witchcraft mania—a quarrel between minister and people; a circle of young girls from eleven to twenty, including some who worked as helps, who met at the minister’s house and practiced together folk-sorcery and that kind of divining that has been the amusement of such for ages. These girls soon began to manifest symptoms of hysteria and hypnotism; one or two married women also had “fits” in sympathy with them. A doctor called to attend them decided that they were afflicted by “an evil hand.” There was some heartless and heedless imposture, no doubt, in what followed, but there was also much of self-deception.

The glimpses of the infernal world that we get in Salem are highly incredible. The witches say prayers to a tall black man with a high-crowned hat—always with a high-crowned hat. They ride on sticks and poles, sometimes they are on brooms,

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and sometimes three are on one pole. One relates that a pole carrying two broke, but, by holding fast to the one in front of her, the witch got safe to her destination. The witches fondle yellow birds, suckling them between their fingers, and one day a girl cries out in meeting that a yellow bird sits on the minister’s hat as it hangs on a pin on the pulpit. The witch usually sits on the great crossbeam of the meetinghouse, fondling the yellow bird. One man was seen to nurse two black pigs at his breasts. Sometimes a hog, sometimes a black dog, appears and says, “Serve me.” Then the dog or pig “looks like a man,” and this man has a yellow bird. Cats naturally abound, white cats and red cats and cats without color. Once a man struck with a rapier at a place designated by one of the girls, and she declared the cat dead and the floor to be all covered with blood. But no one else saw it. This is probably hypnotism, hardly imposture. A great mass of such inconsequent and paltry foolery was believed, not alone by owl-blasted children, but by Stoughton and the other judges, and by pious Samuel Sewall himself, more’s the pity! Where is the motive? What prompted the most eminent Christians and leading citizens to prefer so base a life—companions to cats and dogs and devils? Why did this torture of innocent children, this mischief-working witchcraft with endless perdition at the tail of it, give pleasure to rational creatures? The court never once thought to ask.

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The trial scenes were perdition. The “afflicted children” screamed, went into spasms, shouted, charged the prisoners with torturing them, and their apparent torments were frightful. They laid to the charge of the accused unheard-of deviltries, such as the killing of wives long dead, attempting to choke aged grandparents, and what not besides. Husbands in some instances turned against wives, in others they adhered to them, were accused themselves, and died with them.

The trials were accompanied by great cruelties. Officers of the law were allowed to plunder the estates of the accused of all movable property. The prisoners had to pay their jail expenses, and many families were utterly impoverished. Prisoners were cast into the dungeon and were “fettered.” Goodman Hutchinson complained of certain prisoners for tormenting his wife; additional fetters were put on them, after which Mrs. Hutchinson was “tolerable well.” Some were tortured to make them confess; lads were laid neck and heels until the blood gushed from their noses. These were accredited practices at the time. Several died in prison.

The very skill of the accused was against them. One very neat woman walked miles over dirty roads without showing any mud. “I scorn to be drabbled,” she said, and she was hanged for her cleanliness. George Burroughs, the minister, was a strong man, much addicted to gymnastics. He carried barrels of cider by inserting his fingers into

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the bunghole, and held a seven-foot gun at arm’s length. He was the devil’s man, away with him to the gallows! The first people in the colony became involved. Twenty in all were executed, four or five at a time. Their bodies were ignominiously thrust into holes at the place where they were executed and were scantly covered.

There were brave men and women among them. Giles Corey, an eccentric old man, had at first signed an affidavit of uncertainty about his wife, a woman of piety, and, strange to say, an entire unbeliever in witchcraft. Two of his sons-in-law turned against her, two were for her. But when old Giles was accused he stiffened his neck. He would save his property, which was considerable and might be compromised; he would will it all to his two faithful sons-in-law. He would prove his steadfastness. He made a will, perfect in every part, giving his property to the sons-in-law, and then totally refused to plead and was slowly pressed to death. The constancy of the old man did much to overthrow the partisans of witchcraft. Joseph Putnam, a young man of twenty-two, declared his detestation of the doctrine. He kept some one of his horses bridled and saddled for six months. He armed all his family, and it was understood that he must be taken, if taken at all, pistol in hand. When the mania was at its height he refused to have his child baptized in the village, but carried it to Salem.

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The excitement had risen with every arrest. More than fifty badgered souls had confessed that they were witches. Some had fled the country. But the wide extent of the accusations produced a change in the minds of the people. They knew not who would be struck at next. The governor, at length, refused to call the special court together, and after a tedious confinement a hundred and fifty were released by proclamation. The population of Salem had decreased, its business had suffered, and perhaps it never recovered its prosperity. Slowly the people got over the delusion and came to realize the incalculable and irretrievable harm that had been wrought. Judge Sewall, at a general fast, handed up to the minister to be read a humble confession, and stood while it was read. He annually kept a private day of humiliation. Honor to his memory! The twelve jurymen also signed an affecting paper asking to be forgiven. Cotton Mather, who had been very conspicuous and had published a book about it, never acknowledged himself wrong in this or any other matter. From the time it became unpopular he speaks of the witchcraft trials in a far-away manner, as if they were wholly the work of some one else. He was never forgiven, and probably never ought to have been.

The revulsion was complete. No witches were tried or hanged or “swimmed” in America after the Salem trials. In half a lifetime more the ardor of the English people visibly abated, and few witches were thereafter arrested in England.[1]

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Elucidations.

Note 1, page 4.

In 1638 there was published anonymously the voyage of Domingo Gonzales to the moon, in which clever bit Godwin, Bishop of Hereford, anticipated some of the traits of Bergerac’s A Voyage to the Moon, of Robinson Crusoe, of Gulliver’s Travels, of Peter Wilkins and his Flying Wife, and even of Mr. Stockton’s Negative Gravity, to say nothing of Hans Pfaal, in which Poe imitated the story with purpose aforethought—and I know not how many tales besides. But what interests us most is that under cover of a fantastic story, said to have been written about 1603, the bishop declares himself on the side of Copernicus and Galileo, and suggests the doctrine of gravity propounded by Newton at a later period. On time of writing Antony à Wood, Ath. Oxon., i, 582, second edition, Hallam, part iii, chapter vii, Wilkins, Bishop of Chester, an able mathematician, published anonymously in 1640 two treatises, the first to prove that “the moon may be a world,” the second arguing that the earth is a planet. They are reprinted in his mathematical works. See a character of Wilkins in the life of Seth, Bishop of Salisbury, 27. As late as 1660 Peacham’s Compleat Gentleman gives an account of the ancient system of Ptolemy, and does not think it worth while to inform the polite reader that any other notion of the universe had ever been suggested.

Note 2, page 4.

George Sandys, who died in 1643, and who was the poet secretary to the Virginia colony, wrote in his old age of the firmament

Note 3, page 4.

In 1666 Samuel Danforth published, in Cambridge, Mass., a book entitled An Astronomical Description,of the Late Comet or Blazing Star. It was reprinted in London. He maintained that its orbit was elliptical, and that its center of motion was not the earth—a long stride toward Copernicus. He proved that it was a celestial luminary by its size, its parallax, its duration, its visibility in many countries, etc., and concludes that it is a “planetick or erratick body.” It was observed without instruments. Alexander

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Nowell, a Harvard graduate of the previous year, published an almanac in which he argues in opposition to the old notion that planets have no light of their own, and in 1667 he issued a little booklet which I have not seen, Josselyn’s Voyages to New England, 47-52, if indeed Josselyn has not confused the almanac with an imaginary booklet. In 1674 a thesis for the masters degree at Harvard affirmed the old opinion that the starry heavens were of fire, but in 1688 it was maintained that the material of the celestial and terrestrial bodies were the same, which may have been as far in the direction of the new astronomy as it was safe to go at that time. Young’s Subjects for Master’s Degree, 15. On the notion of the heavenly bodies as free from gravitation, compare Hakewill’s Apologie, 1630: “They are not subject to the qualities of heat and cold, or drought and moisture, nor yet to weight and lightnesse which arise from those qualities,” p. 73. “Light bodies naturally moove vpward and heavy downwarde, that which is neither light nor heavy is rather disposed to a circular motion,” etc., p. 86. See a passage on pp. 85 and 86 on the various hypotheses of celestial motion. In the entire discussion this English divine, learned in the lore of the day, does not think it worth while to mention Copernicus or Tycho, or either of his own great contemporaries, Kepler or Galileo. The Copernican theory was a stone rejected of the builders.

Note 4, page 5.

The calculation is based on the “decumbiture or the time when sickness envaded or ceased [seized] on Allice Wilkins,” which was January 11, 1656, at 6 p. m. This is the only American case of which I know any record. “That ye pty is neatly sick is evident in yt the lord of ye ascendant is not in essential dignity, but in his detriment & in ye six house and is in configuration with had planets, their freindly aspects which signifye the disease will not bee exceeding greate. And in yt there is a melancholly signe in the six house, and his lord of a melancholly nature, we may judge the rise of the desease to proceed from melancholly, and all so choler doth much abound and the bloud corrupted with melancholly humorus the pts affected are these, viz., the heart and back.” So runs on our astrologer until “the stone of the kidneys” is somewhat suddenly hit upon as the disease. The book is in the Winthrop collection in the New York Society Library. There was formerly care taken to administer medicine when the “sign came right”; laxatives were to be given when the moon was in Libra or other favorable constellations, and the

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approach of Saturn was to be guarded against because that malign planet congealed the humors and remedies in the body. Aristotelis Secretum Secretorum, folio xxv, 1528, in Latin black letter. This work, attributed to Aristotle, was often printed in Latin, and was translated into English in the reign of Henry VIII.

Note 5, page 5.

Porta in liber, xiv, Caput iii, under the title Vt aves tenescant, explains that meat exposed to the rays of the moon became more tender, this tenderness being but a form of putrefaction. So wood more rapidly decays, and fruits mature, in the moon-shine.

Note 6, page 6.

Archdeacon Hakewill, in his Apologie, traces the regulation of farm processes by the changes of the moon to Pliny and Aristotle, and even to Hesiod. Hakewill mentions the moon’s supposed influence on lunatics, the selenite, a stone whose light is said to wax and wane with the moon, the tides, etc. “The physitian in opening a veine hath ever an eie to the sign then raigning.” Edition of 1630, pp. 71 and 72. “Mr. Camden observes that the towne of Shrewesbery suffered twice most grievous losse of life by fire within the compasse of fiftie years vpon two severall eclypses of the sunne in Aries,” p. 151. Hakewill thinks the stars “not signes only,” but “causes of immoderate cold or heat, drought or moysture, lightning, thunder, raging windes, inundations, earthquakes, and consequently of famine and pestilence” , but he admits that “ the prognostication . . . is very vncertane.” The popularity of astrology in the seventeenth century is manifest from the frequent references to it, and from the great number of books published on the subject. The doctrine of correspondence connected astrology closely with every other science. Some of the clergy opposed it. See, for example, Henry King’s sermon at St. Paul’s, 1621, p. 25, and, earlier, Hall’s Satires. Tiber ii, satire vii. As early as 1577, indeed, the Bishop of Winchester, writing to Sir W. More, says that he would gladly know the opinion of astrologers relative to the “tayled star.” He would “gladly learn what they find in the lower heavens, for to the higher they never will ascend.” Losely MSS., 491. The reader may compare Hakewill’s Apologie, 126, 128, edition of 1630. The troublous time of the great rebellion led many in England to see signs in the heavens, and brought about an increase of interest in astrology. The opinions prevailing more and more among the best-informed men of the time are set forth

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briefly and with much moderation in the Spanish work Magia Natural, o Ciencia de Filosofia Ocvlta, written by Castrillo, a Jesuit, and published 1649. See especially chapter xi of the first part, in which Castrillo concludes that “the movements or aspects of the heavens are not certain indications of free acts and contingent consequences, for these are subject to changes independently of them.” Folio 17, reverse.

Note 7, page 6.

These words are attributed to Danforth by Josselyn. Danforth’s book on the comet of 1666 I have not seen. But I find the passage in Nowell’s Cambridge Almanac of 1666, the date of the London edition of Danforth. I have therefore credited them to Nowell.

Note 8, page 8.

The discussion of the significance of comets by Kepler in his De Cometis, published in 1619, is an interesting example of a great mind deriding the vulgar astrological notions on the subject, and yet feeling a necessity for some rational explanation of the generally believed connection between comets and disasters. His explanation seems to the modern mind insufficient enough, and he was himself little content with it. “Hæc igitur est, si vlla est, naturalis connexio horum euentuum cum Cometa.” It would have been but a short step from this to the rejection of calamitous comets, head and tail. The works that treat of the ominous character of comets were a considerable element in the literature of Europe in the seventeenth century. Christiani, in 1633, declares that man but a stranger in history who denies that God threatens this “worn-out world” by means of dreadful comets, multiplied by suns, and other portentous phenomena. The passage is quoted by Voëtius in his Excertatio de Prognosticus Cometarum, 1665. Voetius lays stress on the universal consent both of learned and vulgar to the bad reputation of comets. Dr. John Spencer, afterward Dean of Ely, protested in a learned and liberal little book that comets were not ominous. In this Discourse concerning Prodigies, 1663, this large-minded divine maintains that God has no use for “any such winding and squint-ey’d Oracles” as those of the heathen. He aptly characterizes the traditionary science of that day in a single phrase: “A Series of many Assertours which (like persons in the dark) shut their eyes and take care onely to hold fast by those which went before them.” First edition, p. 72. The ridicule in Boileau’s Arrêt Burlesque in 1671 shows that the belief in such portents was waning. Œuvres de Boileau, edition of 1821, iii, 120. The notable comet of 1680, which brought the English

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colonists to the point of talking about reforming their morals, brought forth Pierre Bayle’s work, into which he built a great many other things besides comets. It also awakened discussion in Mexico. Sigurenza y Gorgora, a Mexican priest, published in 1681 his Manifesto filosofico contra los Cometas, in which he opposed the popular dread.

Note 9, page 9.

The larva of this insect, known to us as the army worm, was regarded with similar wonder in Massachusetts. In the probably unique copy of a New England almanac for 1649, preserved in the New York Public Library, an appearance of them in 1646 is set down in the chronology of marvelous events, as is also a great light of pigeons. The conventional hit of verse at the foot of one of the pages is devoted to these omens, ending with the couplet

There will soon be left no living eyewitness of the flights of wild pigeons which were seen in the colonies and continued to occur occasionally in the Ohio Valley a little later than the middle of the nineteenth century. Let me here record my personal testimony that no account which I have seen gives an adequate conception of the incredible size of these vast flocks, which followed one another at short intervals sometimes during an entire day. The apparition seems not to have been so frequent in Virginia as elsewhere, and it was the more terrible in 1675 because it had last occurred before the great Indian massacre of 1644.

Note 10, page 10.

See the strange notions on the propagation of bees in the Insectorum of Movertus, 1634, pp. 12, 13. He says that rustic experience confirms the opinion of famous men that bees are bred from the putrefaction of bulls, oxen, cows, and calves. Kings and leaders among the bees are produced from the brain and spinal marrow, common bees from the flesh. My copy of Movertus has on the margin a note in the handwriting of the learned Vossius, who died in 1649. This is much nearer the truth. Vossius says that the “seed “ of the “king” bee, laid in single cells, is like a poppy seed, and from it the little grubs are produced. Movertus, or, as his name is in English, Mouffet, was the first authoritative writer on insects in England. His work was translated in 1658 into English, but I have not had access to an English version. Butler’s Feminine Monarchic, published in 1634, the same year with Movertus, shows how much the practical bee-keeper knew

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that was not suspected by the man of science. Butler holds the principal bee to be a female, but does not know that she was the only fertile female. He knows the drones to be males, and he does not mention the spontaneous generation of bees from bullocks, which had come down from more than two thousand years on the authority of Aristotle and other classic writers. John Baptist Porta, in his Magia Naturalis, 1644, page 53, quotes from Ovid a passage about bodies that in wasting are changed to little animals—in parva animalia verti—and this of the birth of flower-gathering bees from the waste of slaughtered beeves:

This passage suggests the absence of any considerable power of scientific observation in centuries preceding the eighteenth. A recent French writer says of the seventeenth: “L’esprit d’observation et à fortiori d’expérimentation, qui nous semble si natural a 1’homme d’étude, était à peine né. . .  Quand quelque fait contredisait trop ouvertement la théorie, ils s’en tiraient par une subtilité.” Folet, Molière, et la Médecine, 61.

Note 11 page 11.

The Gentleman, Instructed, 1713, p. 316: “He shews us what our idoliz’d Bodies are by the Infection of Lice, Worms, and Toads they produce.” Movertus, Insectorum Theatrum, 1634, explains the rise of differing parasites on various parts of the human body, p. 260: “Ex humoribus carne adipe, sudoribusque corruptis ortum habent mimes pediculi; et pro loci humorisque natura longe differunt.” The generation of such parasites he regards as an unmistakable sign of misery and sometimes an inevitable scourge of God. This was the notion that Nathaniel Bacon’s opponents made the most of in Virginia. On vital products of the putrid humors of the human body, see Levinus Lemnius De Miraadis Occvltis Natvrm, liber iv. page 403 (16o4). Lemnius says that snakes are produced from the decay of the spinal marrow.

Note 12, page 11.

Lord Bacon’s Natural History, section 696, discusses the generation of insects. Moths originate, he says, in woolen fabrics, especially those in a moist condition. Bacon had got as far as to suppose that creatures spontaneously generated sometimes

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reproduce their kind by procreation. Compare section 900. Dade’s Almanac for 1684 says that an unusual number of frogs, flies, locusts, and so on, is a sign of a pestilential season, “For these creatures, being ingendered of Putrefaction, shew a general disposition of the Year and constitution of the Aire to Putrefaction.” In one of the early volumes of the Royal Society’s Transactions is a proposition to produce cochineal dye in England by generation of insects from putrefaction. Sir Kenelm Dighy, then much esteemed, says that the earth at the outset was most “aptly tempered and dispos’d” and “brought forth perfect animals; as it now being barrener, of its own accord, produces such as we call insecta, as Mice and Frogs, and sometimes new fashion’d Animals.” Peripatetical Institutions, appendix 356, 357. The underlying thought in science and theology was that the world was “worn out” or in decay, and the general effect was a paralyzing pessimism. It was not worth while to do anything notable so near the world’s end, as there would be “scarcely any posterity to inherit its memory.” See Milton’s University oration in Masson, i, 230, and Hakewill’s Apologie, generally with others on “great sickness and malice of the times.” On spontaneous generation compare Browne’s Vulgar Errors, 78, 107, 109, 193, and especially on p. 148 his allusion to “the receipt to make Mice out of Wheat . . . which Helmont hath delivered.” Increase Mather in his Illustrious Providences says that demons can make insects, no seminal virtue being required. Compare also Early English Text Society, v, 229, on the generation of eels. But a new spirit of wholesome scientific skepticism was born in the seventeenth century. The first to question the “equivocal generation” of insects, so far as I know, was Aramatori, in a letter written in 1625. Tiraboschi, Letteratura ltaliana, xiv, 433. Meantime Dr. William Harvey, one of the first scientific minds of the world, took up the subject of generation and published his researches in 1651. In these his genius struck out the great truth that every animal is from the egg. In regard to insects and their spontaneous generation he speaks ambiguously, but the portion of his work devoted to the generation of insects was destroyed or lost in the civil war, and we can never know just how far he had advanced. See Dr. Ent’s letter in Willis’s translation of Harvey’s works, Sydenham Society, 148, and the passages in Harvey on Generation, 170, 456. Werner Rolfink, of Jena, the most learned of German anatomists, and a follower of Harvey, published a textbook on chemistry in 1661 in which he rejected palingenesis.

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Sprengel’s Geschichte der Arzneikunde, iv, 364. About this time the infant Royal Society of London was listening to papers on “the equivocal generation of insects,” on “the making of insects with cheese and sack,” and on “the generation of insects out of dead cantharides”; but there was one paper whose title implies true experimentation “of Flesh not breeding Worms when secured from fly-blowings.” Sprat’s Royal Society, 198, 223. The times were ripening for a great discoverer who should, in spite of Aristotle, extinguish the ancient error and clear the way for modern biology. In 1686 Redi, a Franciscan monk, and also an enthusiastic advocate of Harvey’s doctrines, published his experiments, showing that “none were generated by putrefaction as the ancients believed.” Even so great a naturalist as John Ray was rather slow to receive so surprising a conclusion. Transactions of the Royal Society, Abridgment ii, 765. But though Redi conceded in the spirit of the old philosophy that the “vegetable soul of the plant” might produce the anomalous little creatures found in excrescences, his general conclusion is a broad one: “Venga tutta dalla Semenza reale, e very della piante degli animali stessi, i quali col mezzo dal proprio seme loro Spezia conservano.” Opere, iii, 15.

Note 13, page 12.

Salmon’s English Physician, or the Druggist’s Shop Opened, 1693: “For a long time it was a received Opinion, that they [the barnacle geese] were bred out of old rotten Wood . . . by the enforming power of water: afterwards that they were bred out of certain Shells, which bred upon or stuck to these pieces of Timber, which by means of Sea-weed are fastened thereto by the holes of the rotten Wood, as Michæl Mejer writes.” Salmon gives here a long list of authorities, and proceeds: “Gerarde in his History of Plants, 1588, tells us what he had seen with his Eyes and touched with his hands . . . Shells in shape like those of a Muscle . . . out of which in time comes the shape and form of a Bird, which when it is perfectly formed the shell opens, and the Bird comes forth, hanging by the Bill; in short space after it comes to maturity and falls into the Sea where it gets Feathers.” But the notion had been contested, and Salmon gives some statements in opposition, citing strong words from the closing part of Fabius Columna’s Phytohasanos, pp. 507-511. For another convinced eyewitness see Harrison in Holinshed, i, 67, 374, edition of 1807. Compare Bury wills, Camden Society, 243, and Sir R. Murray in Abridgment of Philosophical Transactions, iii, 853, and Dr. T. Robinson, the same, number 172, p. 1036. For a

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modern treatment of the question, Muller’s Science of Language, ii, lecture xiii. Lovell’s History of Animals, 1661, cites Gesner on this subject, and Douce’s Shakespeare, i, 24, refers to Gaspar Schot’s Physica Curiosa. The evolution of the barnacle into a goose was not the only absurdity of the sort credited. Lovell’s History of Animals and Minerals, 1661, says under “bistard,” or bustard: “Some report that they generate by the month by eructation of sperme.” On the barnacle compare Dr. Andrew D. White’s Warfare of Science and Theology, 36, where the Strasburg edition of Mandeville of 1484 is mentioned as having pictured illustrations both of birds and of beasts produced in the fruit of trees. Bishop Hall proposes for the arms of an upstart boaster of an ancestry traceable to the Conqueror

In Porta’s Magia Naturalis, liber ii, caput iii, is an account of birds produced from the putrefying fruits of trees, and a section entitled Axes é lignorum putrefactione. In this is given, after Gesner, all the details of the spontaneous production of worms in wood that presently have a head, feet, wings, and tail feathers, and grow to the bigness of geese and fly away. Garden sage in decay will also produce birds. One finds in the Manuscript Commission, Eleventh Report, part iii, 27, that Colonel Solomon Richard had observed the barnacle geese to arrive in Ireland on the 21st of August for twenty years with their young, and supposed them to have bred in the isles of Scotland. Richard lived in the later seventeenth century.

Note 14, page 13.

The first appearance in English dress of what we may call the Scandinavian myth of the swallow is, I believe, in Richard Carew’s Survey of Cornwall, 1602, folio 25, reverse. “Olaus Magnus,” says Carew, “maketh a farre stranger report. For he saith that in the North parts of the world as Summer weareth out they clap mouth to mouth, wing to wing, legge in legge, and so after a sweete singing fall down into certaine great lakes or pooles amongst the canes from whence the next spring they receive a new resurrection. The fishermen in winter doe sometimes light on these swallows congealed in clods of a Slymie substance,” etc. Carew also mentions confirmatory accounts received from a Venetian ambassador employed in Poland, and from travelers. In an epitome of Olaus, published in 1552, the

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swallows are seen in the fishermen’s net. Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, ii, 2, 3, cites both Olaus and Carew, but Burton is staggered by the statement of Peter Martyr that swallows and Spanish kites were flying in Egypt in December and January. An early paper before the Royal Society is entitled “Relation of swallows living after they have been frozen under the water.” Sprat, 199. Samuel Johnson, whose chief merit was that he could translate a thing into Latin-English, says “the swallows conglobulate themselves,” and so fall down. White, of Seibourne, struggled with the question of the hibernation of swallows; unable to verify the Scandinavian notion of torpor in the mud at the bottom of rivers and pools, he finally accepts in part the older English belief. He says that “ many of the swallow kind do not depart from this island, but lay themselves up in holes and caverns, and do, insect-like and bat-like, come forth at mild times, and then retire again into their latebrae or lurking places.” The letter from which this was taken was written in 1772. I am indebted to Mrs. Ripley Hitchcock for calling my attention to White’s discussion of the question, and for this list of references to Mr. Burrough’s edition: i. 35. 49, 81, 91, 149, 156, 175; ii, 1, 41, 83, 140, 147, 158, 164. Kalm found the Scandinavian theory prevalent among the descendants of the old Swedish colony on the Delaware. The Dutch at Albany held the other theory of repose in holes in the rocks, while the Canadians and English settlers had somehow come to believe in migration. Kalm’s Travels, ii, 146. But the theory of torpidity was held by the Philadelphia naturalist Barton, in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Ord’s Life of Wilson, 191. According to William Bartram, “very celebrated men” were able to believe in it in 1792, and I have somewhere seen a paper, published in Philadelphia as late as 1800, combating the very tough delusion that swallows hibernated in the water. In the American Philosophical Transactions, vi, p. 59 (1801), is a story thirty years old told by Colonel Antes of a swallow taken out of the slime in February. Salmon, whose English Physician, or the Druggist’s Shop Opened, is dated 1693, does not mention either of the theories of hibernation so much discussed earlier and later. He treats the swallow, the throstle, and the fieldfare as migratory, on the authority of Aldrovandus and Peter Martyr. Dante held to migration: “Come le augei the vernan lungo il Nilo.” Purgatory, xxiv, line 63. It probably holds good of the Latin races that they knew the facts from their residence on the Mediterranean.

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Note 15, page 13.

Charles Morton was perhaps the most accomplished scholar that came to New England in the colonial period. He arrived in 1686, and was appointed vice-president of Harvard College, with the expectation of being made president. He read lectures on philosophy at his home in Charlestown which attracted so many from the college that he found it wise to desist. He died in 1698. See an account of him, 2 Massachusetts Historical Collection, i, 158-162, and Quincy’s History of Harvard College, i, passim.

Note 16, page 18.

Richard, in his Dissertation sur la Possession des corps . . . par les démons, Amiens, 1746, attributes to the Anabaptists the opinion that the word angel is only the name of an office, and that scriptural angels are subjective apparitions, or rather “les bonne ou les mauvaises pensées.” Dufresnoy’s Recueil de Dissertations sur les Apparitions, tome ii, part i, page 196. No such opinion, I think, existed among the New England Puritans; but good angels were not so conspicuous in the theology of the colonies generally as were bad demons. Cotton Mather had great hopes of what good angels might do for him, but that was wholly personal, and born of an imagination that could not be contained within limits. Wendell’s Life of Mather.

Note 17, page 20.

See the remarks of Sprengel on the increase of demonism after the Reformation, Geschichte der Arzneikunde, iii, 273, 274. Luther inherited the traditions of the humble class from which he sprang, and set the first Protestant example of extreme faith in witchcraft, berating the medical men who traced diseases to natural causes, most of which he himself attributed to the devil. He advised that an afflicted child should be cast into the river Mulde, and complained afterward that he was not obeyed. After the Reformation melancholy and hysterical women could no longer relieve their morbid sense of culpability by a meritorious pilgrimage. Perhaps this sort of faith cure was the greatest benefit of the old religion lost by the Lutheran revolution. Puritanism sometimes drove such brain-sick creatures to stark madness.

Note 18, page 21.

The entirely unlawful ordeal by water was retained in Protestant England after that which gave it virtue, the prayers of the priest in tying the thumbs and toes together and his solemn adjuration to the water, was suppressed. The wise King James, in his Demonology, felt bound to find another reason for the witch’s floating. According to that Solomon, the water rejected her for having renounced baptism in her bargain with the devil. A full account of the ancient ordeal by water as practiced on the Continent

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is given by a Dutch writer, Scheltema, in his Geschiedenis der Heksenprocessen, pp. 69 and 70, and the note in the appendix, 18 and 19, where also the mode of exorcising devils is described. The English witch-finders in the seventeenth century not only lacked the prayers and adjurations of the priests, but the rack having been disused, they were compelled to substitute the torture of enforced vigils and incessant walking to wring confessions from their victims. Both Scheltema and Hutchinson express their belief that the mode of holding the rope had much to do with the witch’s floating. See an account of “swimming” a man and a woman at Hartford, Conn., in Mather’s Illustrious Providences. Mather strongly disapproves of the custom, which was obsolete in the south of Europe in his time. It was also opposed by all the German academies. Mather cites Sprenger that it had formerly been used for those accused of other crimes. “The devil is in it,” he says. The declaration of Chief-Justice Parker, in 1712, that if any supposed witch should thereafter die in the dangerous ordeal, those who put her into the water would be held guilty of willful murder, is commonly said to have put an end to the rare sport of baiting old women in England; but, according to Hutchinson, it appears to have been still in vogue some years later. A man was “swam for a wizard” in Suffolk, England, as late as 1825. Hone’s Every Day Book, i, 942, quoting London Times of July 19, 1825. It is to the credit of Increase Mather that he insists that witch confessions should be voluntary.

Note 19, page 24.

As late as June 14, 1711, Addison printed in The Spectator, No. 117, his famous essay an witchcraft. “I believe in general,” he says, “that there is and has been such a thing as witchcraft, but at the same time can give no credit to any particular instances of it.” The politic position taken by Montesquieu in his Esprit des Lois, 1747, livre xii, ch. v, was not very different from Addison’s; and Blackstone puts himself under shelter of Addison and Montesquieu; Commentaries, book iv, chapter iv. It was those who believed thus in evil spirits generally, but refused the evidence in particular cases, that Glanvill calls “nullibists” or no-where-ists.

Note 20, page 26.

In Browne’s Vulgar Errors, 148, it is set down to be considered “whether the brains of Cats be attended with such destructive malignities as Dioscorides and others put upon them.” See a passage on this subject in Parey’s works, book 21, chapter xxxiv. It is to be remembered that though Paré was not an

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English writer, his works were translated into English and his name spelled Parey.

Note 21, page 34.

I have not thought it necessary to fall into what Milton calls a “paroxysm of citations” on this subject. I have given authorities on specific points in passing, but the witch literature of the seventeenth century is oppressively vast. Some of the Continental writers are referred to in Scheltma’s Heksenprocessen, others in Sprengel’s Geschichte der Arzneikunde; there is a list of English writers in the Retrospective Review, v, and the late Justin Winsor printed a pamphlet bibliography of American witchcraft. Francis Hutchinson’s work is the best on witchcraft generally. No subject within the scope of history can be more dreary to the student of original authorities, more revolting to humane feelings, or more disgusting in many of its details. Upham’s Salem Witchcraft, with an account of Salem village, is the only work on the witches in Salem on which one can depend. It has no chapters and no index worthy of the name, and is utterly exasperating, but it is a full account of the witchcraft ordered and made clear. Upham did not know how to make a book, he did not know the subtle laws of mind, but the external facts are well given. I have had recourse to nearly all the other data as well, from Cotton Mather and Calef down.

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