ntism attained its greatest height in Italy, the bite of venomous
spiders was more feared in distant parts of Asia likewise than it had
ever been within the memory of man. There was this difference,
however--that the symptoms supervening on the occurrence of this accident
were not accompanied by the Apulian nervous disorder, which, as has been
shown in the foregoing pages, had its origin rather in the melancholic
temperament of the inhabitants of the south of Italy than in the nature
of the tarantula poison itself. This poison is therefore, doubtless, to
be considered only as a remote cause of the complaint, which, but for
that temperament, would be inadequate to its production. The Persians
employed a very rough means of counteracting the bad consequences of a
poison of this sort. They drenched the wounded person with milk, and
then, by a violent rotatory motion in a suspended box, compelled him to
vomit.

SECT. 6--DECREASE

The Dancing Mania, arising from the tarantula bite, continued with all
those additions of self-deception and of the dissimulation which is such
a constant attendant on nervous disorders of this kind, through the whole
course of the seventeenth century. It was indeed, gradually on the
decline, but up to the termination of this period showed such
extraordinary symptoms that Baglivi, one of the best physicians of that
time, thought he did a service to science by making them the subject of a
dissertation. He repeats all the observations of Ferdinando, and
supports his own assertions by the experience of his father, a physician
at Lecce, whose testimony, as an eye-witness, may be admitted as
unexceptionable.

The immediate consequences of the tarantula bite, the supervening nervous
disorder, and the aberrations and fits of those who suffered from
hysteria, he describes in a masterly style, not does he ever suffer his
credulity to diminish the authenticity of his account, of which he has
been unjustly accused by later writers.

Finally, tarantism has declined more and more in modern times, and is now
limited to single cases. How could it possibly have maintained itself
unchanged in the eighteenth century, when all the links which connected
it with the Middle Ages had long since been snapped asunder? Imposture
grew more frequent, and wherever the disease still appeared in its
genuine form, its chief cause, namely, a peculiar cast of melancholy,
which formerly had been the temperament of th