imes they all coalesce into one great black storm-fiend, who
rages for blood, like a werewolf.

In South Africa we find the werewolf himself. [142] A certain Hottentot
was once travelling with a Bushwoman and her child, when they perceived
at a distance a troop of wild horses. The man, being hungry, asked the
woman to turn herself into a lioness and catch one of these horses, that
they might eat of it; whereupon the woman set down her child, and taking
off a sort of petticoat made of human skin became instantly transformed
into a lioness, which rushed across the plain, struck down a wild horse
and lapped its blood. The man climbed a tree in terror, and conjured his
companion to resume her natural shape. Then the lioness came back, and
putting on the skirt made of human skin reappeared as a woman, and took
up her child, and the two friends resumed their journey after making a
meal of the horse's flesh. [143]

The werewolf also appears in North America, duly furnished with his
wolf-skin sack; but neither in America nor in Africa is he the genuine
European werewolf, inspired by a diabolic frenzy, and ravening for human
flesh. The barbaric myths testify to the belief that men can be changed
into beasts or have in some cases descended from beast ancestors, but
the application of this belief to the explanation of abnormal cannibal
cravings seems to have been confined to Europe. The werewolf of
the Middle Ages was not merely a transformed man,--he was an insane
cannibal, whose monstrous appetite, due to the machinations of the
Devil, showed its power over his physical organism by changing the shape
of it. The barbaric werewolf is the product of a lower and simpler kind
of thinking. There is no diabolism about him; for barbaric races, while
believing in the existence of hurtful and malicious fiends, have not a
sufficiently vivid sense of moral abnormity to form the conception of
diabolism. And the cannibal craving, which to the mediaeval European was
a phenomenon so strange as to demand a mythological explanation,
would not impress the barbarian as either very exceptional or very
blameworthy.

In the folk-lore of the Zulus, one of the most quick-witted and
intelligent of African races, the cannibal possesses many features in
common with the Scandinavian Troll, who also has a liking for human
flesh. As we saw in the preceding paper, the Troll has very likely
derived some of his characteristics from reminiscences of the barbaro