Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/89

Rh prevalence of gross superstition in the communities where they are practiced. The first and strongest impulse of the European peasant even in the most enlightened countries is to ascribe all extraordinary good or evil fortune to diabolical agencies. If a man's hens lay more eggs, or his cows give more milk, or his fields yield better crops than those of his neighbors, the latter are pretty sure to attribute his prosperity to witchcraft. Pliny records a case of this kind in which the freedman C. Furius Cresinus was summoned to appear before the ædile Spurius Albinus on the charge of sorcery, because he raised richer harvests on his small farm than others did on their large estates. In his defense he pointed to his well-fed slaves, his superior agricultural implements, and his fat oxen, and exclaimed: "These, O Quirites, are some of my magic arts; but my night-waking and continuous toil I can not show you here on the forum!" Curiously enough, in the early part of the last century precisely the same accusation was brought against a woman who cultivated her own land at Bischofswerder, in west Prussia; and again in November, 1893, at Dresden, a shoemaker named Liebscher instituted a suit against a miner and small innkeeper named Timmel to recover damages for defamation of a like character. Both parties lived in the village of Müdisdorf, not far from Freiberg. It seems that Liebscher's hens and cows supplied him abundantly with eggs and milk, whereas Timmel's were remarkably unproductive. Liebscher was then charged with practicing sorcery, and thereby transferring the eggs and milk from Timmel's poultry and kine to his own. As this report was diligently circulated by the defendant and believed by the great majority of the inhabitants of Müdisdorf and of the surrounding country, it naturally proved to be very injurious to the reputation and the business of the shoemaker, who appears to have been a man of intelligence far superior to that of his neighbors. The testimony taken at the trial revealed the startling fact that nine tenths of the population of this mining district, although good Protestants, hold firmly to the belief in witchcraft and the reality of satanic compacts.

In the summer of 1874 a woman named Frenzel, living at Trulben, in the Bavarian palatinate, consulted a famous wizard at Ixheim, near Zweibrücken, in order to ascertain who had bewitched her child that he should have fallen sick. The wizard placed a key in an open Bible and told Frau Frenzel to lay her finger on it and then to repeat the names of all the people in Trulben. No sooner had she mentioned Margaret Klein than the key turned over. "That is the witch," exclaimed the wizard, who also learned through the movements of the key that she had acquired her knowledge of the magic art from her grandmother, and had the power of transforming herself into a cat or dog at