s of Men and Women
upon a Natural Foundation, (that is) to stir up and excite such Humours
superabounding in their Bodies to a great Excess, whereby he did in an
Extraordinary Manner Afflict them with such Distempers as their Bodies
were most subject to, as particularly appeared in these Children; for he
considered that these swooning Fits were Natural, and nothing else but
that they call the Mother, but only heightened to a great excess by the
subtilty of the Devil co-operating with the Malice of these which we term
Witches, at whose instance he doth these Villanies." Such an argument as
this was then held quite as pertinent and irresistible as would now be the
evidence of the microscope and the test of chemical experiment. It is
refreshing, in the midst of all this wild nonsense, to find that some
gentlemen--Lord Cornwallis, Sir Edmund Bacon, and Mr. Serjeant Keeling,
who had been directed by the Lord Chief Justice to make an experiment with
these girls--openly protested against the whole thing, affirming it to be
an imposture from first to last; and that when the children covered up
their heads in their aprons, and shrieked and writhed when Rose Cullender
or Amy Duny touched them, they did it in full possession of their senses,
and perfectly understanding what they were about. For when they tried them
with other women whom they made believe were the two, cried out on, and
took care that their eyes were held, so that they should not see, the
children shrieked and howled, and went off into their fits all the same;
which double experiment satisfied the gentlemen of the fraudulent
character of it all. But this little nucleus of rationality was not strong
enough to disperse the thick darkness gathered round the minds of all
present--gathered round the mind of even Sir Thomas Brown and the "good"
Sir Matthew Hale; and when one witness had deposed that his cart had stuck
fast between some posts, and that the haymakers could not unload the hay
until the next morning, because Rose Cullender had threatened him; and
another that his pigs and cattle died in a most extraordinary manner, and
he himself swarmed with vermin which he could not get rid of, because he
also had been threatened by her; and a third that she had lost her geese
because Amy Duny had said she should; and that a chimney had fallen down
because Amy Duny had said it would--when all these things had been sworn
to and proved, then the minds of the judge and jury admi