of Satan.

It is related that the Indian tribes in New England were sorely puzzled
at the infatuation of the settlers, and thought them either a race
inferior to, or more sinful than the French colonists in the vicinity,
amongst whom, as they remarked, "the Great Spirit sent no witches."

Returning again to the continent of Europe, we find that, after the
year 1680, men became still wiser upon this subject. For twenty years
the populace were left to their belief, but governments in general gave
it no aliment in the shape of executions. The edict of Louis XIV. gave
a blow to the superstition, from which it never recovered. The last
execution in the Protestant cantons of Switzerland was at Geneva, in
1652. The various potentates of Germany, although they could not stay
the trials, invariably commuted the sentence into imprisonment, in all
cases where the pretended witch was accused of pure witchcraft,
unconnected with any other crime. In the year 1701, Thomasius, the
learned professor at the University of Halle, delivered his inaugural
thesis, "De Crimine Magiae," which struck another blow at the falling
monster of popular error. But a faith so strong as that in witchcraft
was not to be eradicated at once: the arguments of learned men did not
penetrate to the villages and hamlets, but still they achieved great
things; they rendered the belief an unworking faith, and prevented the
supply of victims, on which for so many ages it had battened and grown
strong.

Once more the delusion broke out; like a wild beast wounded to the
death, it collected all its remaining energies for the final
convulsion, which was to show how mighty it had once been. Germany,
which had nursed the frightful error in its cradle, tended it on its
death-bed, and Wurzburg, the scene of so many murders on the same
pretext, was destined to be the scene of the last. That it might lose
no portion of its bad renown, the last murder was as atrocious as the
first. This case offers a great resemblance to that of the witches of
Mohra and New England, except in the number of its victims. It happened
so late as the year 1749, to the astonishment and disgust of the rest
of Europe.

A number of young women in a convent at Wurzburg fancied themselves
bewitched; they felt, like all hysteric subjects, a sense of
suffocation in the throat. They went into fits repeatedly; and one of
them, who had swallowed needles, evacuated them at abscesses, which
formed in diffe