ly are agreed that a large percentage of
those people who voluntarily confessed they were werwolves were mere
dissemblers, there is no recorded conclusive testimony to show that all
such self-accused persons were shams and delusionaries. Besides, even
if such testimony were forthcoming, it would in nowise preclude the
existence of the werwolf.

Nor does the fact that all the accused persons submitted to the rack, or
other modes of torture, confessed themselves werwolves prove that all
such confessions were false.

Granted also that some of the charges of lycanthropy were groundless,
being based on malice--which, by the by, is no argument for the
non-existence of lycanthropy, since it is acknowledged that accusations
of all sorts, having been based on malice, have been equally
groundless--there is nothing in the nature of written evidence that
would justify one in assuming that all such charges were traceable to
the same cause, _i.e._, a malicious agency. Neither can one dismiss the
testimony of those who swore they were actual eye-witnesses of
metamorphoses, on the mere assumption that all such witnesses were
liable to hallucination or hysteria, or were hyper-imaginative.

Testimony to an event having taken place must be regarded as positive
evidence of such an occurrence, until it can be satisfactorily proved to
be otherwise--and this is where the case of the sceptic breaks down; he
can only offer assumption, not proof.

Another view, advanced by those who discredit werwolves, is that belief
in the existence of such an anomaly originates in the impression made
on man in early times by the great elemental powers of nature. It was,
they say, man's contemplation of the changes of these great elemental
powers of nature, _i.e._, the changes of the sun and moon, wind, thunder
and lightning, of the day and night, sunshine and rain, of the seasons,
and of life and death, and his deductions therefrom, that led to his
belief in and worship of gods that could assume varying shapes, such,
for example, as India (who occasionally took the form of a bull),
Derketo (who sometimes metamorphosed into a fish), Poseidon, Jupiter
Ammon, Milosh Kobilitch, Minerva, and countless others--and that it is
to this particular belief and worship, which is to be found in the
mythology of every race, that all religions, as well as belief in
fairies, demons, werwolves, and phantasms, may be traced.

Well, this might be so, if there were not, in m