rom being tormented by the spirit,
which returns no more.

Footnotes:

[472] V. Moreri on the word _stryges_.

CHAPTER XIV.

CONJECTURES OF THE "GLANEUR DE HOLLANDE," DUTCH GLEANER, IN 1733.--NO.
IX.

The Dutch Gleaner, who is by no means credulous, supposes the truth of
these facts as certain, having no good reason for disputing them, and
reasons upon them in a way which shows he thinks lightly of the
matter; he asserts that the people, amongst whom vampires are seen,
are very ignorant and very credulous, so that the apparitions we are
speaking of are only the effects of a prejudiced fancy. The whole is
occasioned and augmented by the bad nourishment of these people, who,
the greater part of their time, eat only bread made of oats, roots,
and the bark of trees--aliments which can only engender gross blood,
which is consequently much disposed to corruption, and produces dark
and bad ideas in the imagination.

He compares this disease to the bite of a mad dog, which communicates
its venom to the person who is bitten; thus, those who are infected by
vampirism communicate this dangerous poison to those with whom they
associate. Thence the wakefulness, dreams, and pretended apparitions
of vampires.

He conjectures that this poison is nothing else than a worm, which
feeds upon the purest substance of man, constantly gnaws his heart,
makes the body die away, and does not forsake it even in the depth of
the grave. It is certain that the bodies of those who have been
poisoned, or who die of contagion, do not become stiff after their
death, because the blood does not congeal in the veins; on the
contrary, it rarifies and bubbles much the same as in vampires, whose
beard, hair, and nails grow, whose skin is rosy, who appear to have
grown fat, on account of the blood which swells and abounds in them
everywhere.

As to the cry uttered by the vampires when the stake is driven through
their heart, nothing is more natural; the air which is there confined,
and thus expelled with violence, necessarily produces that noise in
passing through the throat. Dead bodies often do as much without being
touched. He concludes that it is only an imagination that is deranged
by melancholy or superstition, which can fancy that the malady we have
just spoken of can be produced by vampire corpses, which come and suck
away, even to the last drop, all the blood in the body.

A little before, he says that in 1732 they discovered aga