acks till they lost
them; when, suddenly crouching among the bushes, his teeth chattering
with fear, they found a man half naked, with long hair and beard, and
with his hands dyed in blood. His nails were long as claws, and were
clotted with fresh gore and shreds of human flesh." [80]

This man, Jacques Roulet, was a poor, half-witted creature under the
dominion of a cannibal appetite. He was employed in tearing to pieces
the corpse of the boy when these countrymen came up. Whether there were
any wolves in the case, except what the excited imaginations of the men
may have conjured up, I will not presume to determine; but it is certain
that Roulet supposed himself to be a wolf, and killed and ate several
persons under the influence of the delusion. He was sentenced to death,
but the parliament of Paris reversed the sentence, and charitably shut
him up in a madhouse.

The annals of the Middle Ages furnish many cases similar to these of
Grenier and Roulet. Their share in maintaining the werewolf superstition
is undeniable; but modern science finds in them nothing that cannot be
readily explained. That stupendous process of breeding, which we call
civilization, has been for long ages strengthening those kindly social
feelings by the possession of which we are chiefly distinguished from
the brutes, leaving our primitive bestial impulses to die for want of
exercise, or checking in every possible way their further expansion by
legislative enactments. But this process, which is transforming us from
savages into civilized men, is a very slow one; and now and then there
occur cases of what physiologists call atavism, or reversion to an
ancestral type of character. Now and then persons are born, in civilized
countries, whose intellectual powers are on a level with those of the
most degraded Australian savage, and these we call idiots. And now and
then persons are born possessed of the bestial appetites and cravings
of primitive man, his fiendish cruelty and his liking for human flesh.
Modern physiology knows how to classify and explain these abnormal
cases, but to the unscientific mediaeval mind they were explicable only
on the hypothesis of a diabolical metamorphosis. And there is nothing
strange in the fact that, in an age when the prevailing habits of
thought rendered the transformation of men into beasts an easily
admissible notion, these monsters of cruelty and depraved appetite
should have been regarded as capable of taking