ocess of
time over Europe, so that it was communicated not only to the Romaic, but
also to the German and Sarmatian nations, and descended from the ancients
as a legacy of affliction to posterity. In modern times Lycanthropy--such
was the name given to this infatuation--has vanished from the earth, but
it is nevertheless well worthy the consideration of the observer of human
aberrations, and a history of it by some writer who is equally well
acquainted with the middle ages as with antiquity is still a desideratum.
We leave it for the present without further notice, and turn to a malady
most extraordinary in all its phenomena, having a close connection with
the St. Vitus's dance, and, by a comparison of facts which are altogether
similar, affording us an instructive subject for contemplation. We
allude to the disease called Tarantism, which made its first appearance
in Apulia, and thence spread over the other provinces of Italy, where,
during some centuries, it prevailed as a great epidemic. In the present
times, it has vanished, or at least has lost altogether its original
importance, like the St. Vitus's dance, lycanthropy, and witchcraft.

SECT. 2--MOST ANCIENT TRACES--CAUSES

The learned Nicholas Perotti gives the earliest account of this strange
disorder. Nobody had the least doubt that it was caused by the bite of
the tarantula, a ground-spider common in Apulia: and the fear of this
insect was so general that its bite was in all probability much oftener
imagined, or the sting of some other kind of insect mistaken for it, than
actually received. The word tarantula is apparently the same as
terrantola, a name given by the Italians to the stellio of the old
Romans, which was a kind of lizard, said to be poisonous, and invested by
credulity with such extraordinary qualities, that, like the serpent of
the Mosaic account of the Creation, it personified, in the imaginations
of the vulgar, the notion of cunning, so that even the jurists designated
a cunning fraud by the appellation of a "stellionatus." Perotti
expressly assures us that this reptile was called by the Romans
tarantula; and since he himself, who was one of the most distinguished
authors of his time, strangely confounds spiders and lizards together, so
that he considers the Apulian tarantula, which he ranks among the class
of spiders, to have the same meaning as the kind of lizard called [Greek
text], it is the less extraordinary that the unlearned c