of "good witches," upon the statements of the
dying, or upon the charges of those who had suffered ill after threats,
he thought ought to be used with great caution. It is evident that
Perkins--though he doubtless would not have admitted it himself--was
affected by the reading of Scot. Yet it is disappointing to find him
condoning the use of torture[8] in extreme instances.[9]

A Cambridge man who wrote about a score of years after Perkins put forth
opinions a good deal farther advanced. John Cotta was a "Doctor in
Physicke" at Northampton who had taken his B. A. at Cambridge in 1595,
his M. A. the following year, and his M. D. in 1603. Nine years after
leaving Cambridge he had published _A Short Discoverie of the Unobserved
Dangers_, in which he had devoted a very thoughtful chapter to the
relation between witchcraft and sickness. In 1616 he elaborated his
notions in _The Triall of Witchcraft_,[10] published at London. Like
Perkins he disapproved of the trial by water.[11] He discredited, too,
the evidence of marks, but believed in contracts with the Devil, and
cited as illustrious instances the cases of Merlin and "that infamous
woman," Joan of Arc.[12] But his point of view was of course mainly that
of a medical man. A large number of accusations of witchcraft were due
to the want of medical examination. Many so-called possessions could be
perfectly diagnosed by a physician. He referred to a case where the
supposed witches had been executed and their victim had nevertheless
fallen ill again.[13] Probably this was the case of Mistress Belcher, on
whose account two women had been hanged at Northampton.[14]

Yet Cotta believed that there were real witches and arraigned Scot for
failing to distinguish the impostors from the true.[15] It was indeed,
he admitted, very hard to discover, except by confession; and even
confession, as he had pointed out in his first work, might be a "meane,
poore and uncertain proofe," because of the Devil's power to induce
false confession.[16] Here the theologian--it was hard for a
seventeenth-century writer not to be a theologian--was cropping out. But
the scientific spirit came to the front again when he made the point
that imagination was too apt to color observations made upon bewitched
and witch.[17] The suggestion that coincidence explained many of the
alleged fulfillments of witch predictions[18] was equally in advance of
his times.

How, then, were real cases of bewitchment to be