Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/483

Rh Germany, during the century following the Reformation, the great Saxon jurist, Benedict Carpzov, distinguished himself by his skill in demonstrating the reality of the crime from Scripture, and by his cruelty in detecting and punishing it by torture.

Typical as to the attitude of Scotch and English Protestants, was the theory and practice of King James I, "the crowned Solomon," himself the author of a book on demonology. James had married the Princess of Denmark, and the ship which bore her to the British shores encountered tempests. Skillful use of unlimited torture soon brought the causes to light. A Doctor Fian, while his legs were crushed in the "boots" and wedges driven under his finger-nails, confessed that several hundred witches had gone to sea in a sieve from the port of Leith, and had raised storms and tempests to drive back the king's bride. Still later, in the second half of the seventeenth century, we see a typical example of the same superstition in England in the case of Meric Casaubon, Doctor of Divinity and an ecclesiastic in high position at Canterbury. He declared fully for the doctrine that witches raise storms, citing the foremost ecclesiastical authorities.

In America, the great weight of the elder Mather was thrown on the same side. But, in spite of all these great authorities, in every land, and in spite of such summary punishments as those of Loos and Bekker, scientific thought was developed; and, at the end of the seventeenth century, this vast growth of superstition began to wither and droop. Bayle in France, Calef in New England, and Thomasius in Germany, did much to create an intellectual and moral atmosphere fatal to it. Torture being abolished, "weather-makers" no longer confessed; and the fundamental proofs in which the system was rooted were evidently slipping away. Even the great theologian