stairs, he may drive her out at the window! If they travelled at home, they set off to note down prodigies. Dr. Plott, in a magnificent project of journeying through England, for the advantage of "Learning and Trade," and the discovery of "Antiquities and other Curiosities," for which he solicited the royal aid which Leland enjoyed, among other notable designs, discriminates a class thus: "Next I shall inquire of animals; and first of strange people."--"Strange accidents that attend corporations or families, as that the deans of Rochester ever since the foundation by turns have died deans and bishops; the bird with a white breast that haunts the family of Oxenham near Exeter just before the death of any of that family; the bodies of trees that are seen to swim in a pool near Brereton in Cheshire, a certain warning to the heir of that honourable family to prepare for the next world." And such remarkables as "Number of children, such as the Lady Temple, who before she died saw seven hundred descended from her."[203] This fellow of the Royal Society, who lived nearly to 1700, was requested to give an edition of Pliny: we have lost the benefit of a most copious commentary! Bishop Hall went to "the Spa." The wood about that place was haunted not only by "freebooters, but by wolves and witches; although these last are ofttimes but one." They were called _loups-garoux_; and the Greeks, it seems, knew them by the name of [Greek: lukanthropoi], men-wolves: witches that have put on the shapes of those cruel beasts. "We sawe a boy there, whose half-face was devoured by one of them near the village; yet so, as that the eare was rather cut than bitten off." Rumour had spread that the boy had had half his face devoured; when it was examined, it turned out that his ear had only been scratched! However, there can be no doubt of the existence of "witch-wolves;" for Hall saw at Limburgh "one of those miscreants executed, who confessed on the wheel to have devoured two-and-forty children in that form." They would probably have found it difficult to have summoned the mothers who had lost the children. But observe our philosopher's reasoning: "It would aske a large volume to scan this problem of _lycanthropy_." He had laboriously collected all the evidence, and had added his arguments: the result offers a curious instance of acute reasoning on a wrong principle.[204]