e of what are usually called "blue devils" should be
constant in their attendance on a particular state of cerebral disorder;
but when the hallucination becomes so complex as in the fantasies of
witchcraft, it is difficult to suppose that that long train of appearances
and imaginary transactions should follow on a merely pathological
derangement of the brain. Between the two alternatives of referring these
hallucinations to such a cause, on the one hand, or to a mesmeric
sympathy, as above suggested, between the individual and the crowd of the
possessed, on the other, it is hard to choose; but, perhaps, the latter
will appear to offer the less amount of difficulty. In the present state
of knowledge, however, it would be rash to say that a particular state of
diseased cerebral action might not be attended with a perfect set of
supposed phenomena as complex and constant in the minds of the sufferers,
as those which existed among the victims of demonomania.

An example less difficult of reconcilement with the theory of cerebral
disorder than that of the witchcraft of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, and yet more complex than that of the fantasies of _delirium
tremens_, may be found in the case of _lycanthropism_, or that form of
mania in which men have fancied themselves transformed into wolves. This
disease also is contagious; and on many occasions has exhibited itself in
all the terrors of a maniacal epidemic. As early as the time of Herodotus
the belief was rife among the Graeco-Scythian colonies that a people called
the Neuri were subject to this species of metamorphosis; and Giraldus
Cambrensis, in the twelfth century, found the same superstition in full
force in Ireland. It again broke forth in Livonia, its ancient seat, with
all the symptoms of a periodical annual epidemic, in the sixteenth
century. Peucer gives the following account of what these maniacs
themselves believed to happen to them. "Immediately after Christmas day,
in each year, a club-footed boy appears, who goes round the country, and
summons all those slaves of Satan, of whom there are great numbers, to
assemble and follow him. If they hesitate or refuse, a tall man appears,
armed with a whip of flexible iron wires, and compels them with blows of
his scourge to come forth and proceed. He whips them so severely, that
oft-times the stripes left by the iron thongs remain impressed on their
bodies and torment them cruelly. As soon as they go out and f