by
the removal from her own home, and the tortures inflicted upon her, that
she died the next day in prison. Happily for the persons she had named in
her confession, Dundas of Arniston, at that time the king's
advocate-general, wrote to the sheriff-depute, one Captain Ross of
Littledean, cautioning him not to proceed to trial, the "thing being of
too great difficulty, and beyond the jurisdiction of an inferior court."
Dundas himself examined the precognition with great care, and was so
convinced of the utter folly of the whole case, that he quashed all
further proceedings.

We find this same sheriff-depute of Caithness very active four years
afterwards in another trial for witchcraft. In spite of the warning he had
received that all such cases were to be tried in future by the superior
courts, he condemned to death an old woman at Dornoch, upon the charge of
bewitching the cows and pigs of her neighbours. This poor creature was
insane, and actually laughed and clapped her hands at sight of "the bonnie
fire" that was to consume her. She had a daughter who was lame both of her
hands and feet, and one of the charges brought against her was, that she
had used this daughter as a pony in her excursions to join the devil's
sabbath, and that the devil himself had shod her, and produced lameness.

This was the last execution that took place in Scotland for witchcraft.
The penal statutes were repealed in 1736; and, as in England, whipping,
the pillory, or imprisonment, were declared the future punishments of all
pretenders to magic or witchcraft.

Still for many years after this the superstition lingered both in England
and Scotland, and in some districts is far from being extinct even at this
day. But before we proceed to trace it any further than to its legal
extinction, we have yet to see the frightful havoc it made in continental
Europe from the commencement of the seventeenth to the middle of the
eighteenth century. France, Germany, and Switzerland were the countries
which suffered most from the epidemic. The number of victims in these
countries during the sixteenth century has already been mentioned; but at
the early part of the seventeenth, the numbers are so great, especially in
Germany, that were they not to be found in the official records of the
tribunals, it would be almost impossible to believe that mankind could
ever have been so maddened and deluded. To use the words of the learned
and indefatigable Horst,[35] "t