The opinions of the opposition are more entertaining, if their works did not have so wide a sale. The physician who wrote to his friend in London poked fun at the witchmongers. It was dangerous to do so, he admitted, "especially in the Country, where to make the least Doubt is a Badge of Infidelity."[2] As for him, he envied the privileges of the town. He proceeded to take up the case of Anne Thorne. Her seven-minute mile run with a broken knee was certainly puzzling. "If it was only a violent Extention of the Rotula, something might be allow'd: but it is hard to tell what this was, your Country Bone-Setters seldom plaguing their heads with Distinctions."[3] The "Viciousness of Anne Thorn's opticks,"[4] the silly character of the clergyman's evidence, and the spiritual juggles at exorcism,[5] all these things roused his merriment. As for Jane's confession, it was the result of ensnaring questions.[6] He seemed to hold the clergy particularly responsible for witch cases and advised them to be more conversant with the history of diseases and to inquire more narrowly into the physical causes of things. A defender of Justice Powell, probably Henry Stebbing, later an eminent divine but now a young Cambridge master of arts, entered the controversy. He was not altogether a skeptic about witchcraft in general, but his purpose was to show that the evidence against Jane Wenham was weak. The two chief witnesses, Matthew Gilston and Anne Thorne, were "much disturbed in their Imaginations." There were many absurdities in their stories. He cited the story of Anne Thorne's mile run in seven minutes. Who knew that it was seven minutes? There was no one timing her when she started. How was it known that she went half a mile? And, supposing these narratives were true, would they prove anything? The writer took up piece after piece of the evidence in this way and showed its absurdity. Some of his criticisms are amusing--he attacked silly testimony in such a solemn way--yet he had, too, his sense of fun. It had been alleged, he wrote, that the witch's flesh, when pricked, emitted no blood, but a thin watery matter. "Mr. Chauncy, it is like, expected that Jane Wenham's Blood shou'd have been as rich and as florid as that of Anne Thorne's, or of any other Virgin of about 16. He makes no difference, I see, between the Beef and Mutton Regimen, and that of Turnips and Water-gruel."[7] Moreover, he urges, it is well known that fright congeals the blood.[8]