careful mistress, has gadded about, has neglected
her house and has belittled her husband, they shall throw that woman
into the water.

"If a physician operates on a man for a severe wound with a bronze
lancet and causes the man's death, or opens an abscess (in the eye) of a
man with a bronze lancet and destroys the man's eye, they shall cut off
his fingers.

"If a builder builds a house for a man and does not make its
construction firm and the house, which he has built, collapses and
causes the death of the owner of the house, that builder shall be put to
death."

It is, however, with only one of King Hammurabi's wise laws that this
inquiry has to do, and it is this:

"If a man has placed an enchantment upon a man, and has not justified
himself, he upon whom the enchantment is placed to the Holy River
(Euphrates) shall go; into the Holy River he shall plunge. If the Holy
River holds (drowns) him he who enchanted him shall take his house. If
on the contrary, the man is safe and thus is innocent, the wizard loses
his life, and his house."

Or, as another translation has it:

"If a man ban a man and cast a spell on him--if he cannot justify it he
who has banned shall be killed."

"If a man has cast a spell on a man and has not justified it, he on whom
the spell has been thrown shall go to the River God, and plunge into the
river. If the River God takes him he who has banned him shall be saved.
If the River God show him to be innocent, and he be saved, he who banned
him shall be killed, and he who plunged into the river shall take the
house of him who banned him."

There can be no more convincing evidence of the presence and power of
the great witchcraft superstition among the primitive races than this
earliest law; and it is to be especially noted that it prescribes one of
the very tests of guilt--the proof by water--which was used in another
form centuries later, on the continent, in England and New England, at
Wurzburg and Bonn, at Rouen, in Suffolk, Essex and Devon, and at Salem
and Hartford and Fairfield, when "the Devil starteth himself up in the
pulpit, like a meikle black man, and calling the row (roll) everyone
answered, Here!"

CHAPTER II

"To deny the possibility, nay actual evidence of witchcraft and sorcery,
is at once to flatly contradict the revealed word of God in various
passages both of the Old and New Testaments." _Blackstone's
Commentaries_ (Vol. 4, ch. 4, p. 60).

"It was simply t