ung themselves down in the market-place and fell asleep, as they
lay scattered up and down here and there. But the wives of the
Amphisseans, fearing because the city was engaged to aid in the Phocean
war, and abundance of the tyrants' soldiers were present in the city, the
_Thyades_ should have any indignity put upon them, ran forth all of them
into the market-place, and stood silently round about them; neither would
offer them any disturbance while they slept, but when they were awake they
attended their service particularly, and brought them refreshments; and,
in fine, by persuasion, obtained leave of their husbands that they might
accompany them in safety to their own borders."

In the same way, throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, might
groups of both sexes be seen lying, exhausted from their agitations, in
the streets of Aix-la-chapelle, Cologne, Strasburg, Naples, and elsewhere;
and even in our own century sights not dissimilar have been witnessed at
revival assemblages in Wales and Scotland, and at camp-meetings in North
America. The rending of Pentheus on Mount Citheron by his own mother and
sisters, who, while under the influence of the Bacchic _afflatus_,
imagined they saw in his form the appearance of a wild beast, might be
adduced as an example at once of the furious character of the frenzy, and
of the liability of the afflated to optical illusions. Has what we read of
fairy-gifts and glamour any foundation in this alleged power of the
biologist to make his patient imagine different forms for the same object?
But we are still among the mountain tops, and must descend to the
remaining symptoms enumerated by Jamblichus.

"They pass over rivers in a wonderful manner, which the priestess herself
also does in the Cataballa." We here again encounter the _indicia_, of
that possession which went by the name of witchcraft in the middle ages. A
witch, really possessed, could not sink in the water, any more than she
could feel the insertion of a needle. The vulgar belief is, that the
suspected witch was cast into a pond, where, if she floated, she was
burned, and if she sank she was drowned. The latter alternative was not
so; if she betrayed no preternatural buoyancy, the trial was so far in her
favor, and she was taken up.

Nor was water the only test, in some parts of Germany the triers, less
philosophically, employed scales; and had fixed weights (from 14 to 15
lbs.), which, if the accused did not cou