evil-disposed wizard of the middle
ages, be in truth no more than an exertion of biological power, it behoves
society to take care how individuals should be suffered to acquire
mesmerical relations with others, over whom they may exercise malignant as
well as healing influences. If the pretensions of the biologists be
established, biology must soon be put under medical supervision. But to
return to the phenomena of possession.

The propriety of trying alleged witches by water, has been impugned and
defended with abundance of scholastic learning; and, singular to say, its
opponents have been chiefly found among the Roman Catholic writers, and
its advocates among the Reformers. Delrio, by far the most learned of all
the writers on demonology, vigorously assails Rickius, the only notable
Roman Catholic advocate of the practice. The arguments on both sides being
based entirely on scholastic definitions and distinctions respecting the
nature of demons, and the baptismal and other spiritual virtues of water,
are of little relevance in the present method of discussing physical
phenomena. Both parties assume that the persons of witches exhibit a
preternatural levity--Delrio admitting that something less than fourteen or
fifteen pounds was the actual weight which popular belief throughout
Germany ascribed to persons in that possessed state, no matter how large
or fat they might seem to the eye; and Rickius gives an example of a
woman, executed by drowning in 1594, whom the executioner could hardly
keep under with repeated thrusts of his pole, so high did she bound
upwards from the surface, and "so boil up," as it were, out of the depths
of the water. The levity of possessed persons in water might be accounted
for by a phenomenon attendant on those preternatural conditions of the
body which follow excitements of an analogous kind. The victims of the
flogging and dancing manias in the middle ages, and subjects of the
fanatical fervors of camp-meetings and revivals, alike experienced a windy
intestinal distension, consequent on the departure of their mental frenzy.
To control this disagreeable symptom, the candidates for both species of
afflatus used to come to their meetings provided with napkins and rollers
with which to bind their middles, and prevent the supervening inflation.
Persons so puffed up would certainly float with all the buoyancy ascribed
to the German witches, if cast into water; but they would still preserve
their