Demonologia : $b or, natural knowledge revealed; being an exposé of ancient and modern superstitions, credulity, fanaticism, enthusiasm, & imposture, as connected with the doctrine, caballa, and jargon, of amulets, apparitions, astrology, charms, demonology, devils, divination, dreams, deuteroscopia, effluvia, fatalism, fate, friars, ghosts, gipsies, hell, hypocrites, incantations, inquisition, jugglers, legends, magic, magicians, miracles, monks, nymphs, oracles, physiognomy, purgatory, predestForsyth, J. S.
History
Demonologia : $b or, natural knowledge revealed; being an exposé of ancient and modern superstitions, credulity, fanaticism, enthusiasm, & imposture, as connected with the doctrine, caballa, and jargon, of amulets, apparitions, astrology, charms, demonology, devils, divination, dreams, deuteroscopia, effluvia, fatalism, fate, friars, ghosts, gipsies, hell, hypocrites, incantations, inquisition, jugglers, legends, magic, magicians, miracles, monks, nymphs, oracles, physiognomy, purgatory, predest
Forsyth, J. S.
Demonology; Superstition; Witchcraft
It must require the exercise not alone of vast patience, but also of
extraordinary cruelty, mingled perhaps with much kindness, to train
animals to exhibit a degree of intelligence approaching to that of human
beings. It is said that bears are taught to dance by being placed in a
den with a floor of heated iron: the animal, endeavouring to avoid the
smart to which his paws are thus exposed, rears himself on his hind
legs, and alternately raises them with the utmost rapidity, during all
which time a flageolet is played to him; and after this lesson has been
frequently repeated, he becomes so impressed with the associated
recollection of the music and the pain, that, whenever he hears the same
tune, he instinctively recurs to the same efforts, in order to escape
the fancied danger.
In the middle of the last century, there was an Englishman, named
Wildman, who excited great attention by the possession of a secret
through the means of which he enticed bees to follow him, and to settle
on his person without stinging him. A similar circumstance is related in
Francis Bruce’s voyage to Africa in 1698, in which mention is made of a
man who was constantly surrounded by a swarm of these insects, and who
had thence obtained the title of “King of the bees.”
Only one instance is recorded in ancient history of the art of supplying
the deficiency of hands by the use of toes; and that is of an Indian
slave belonging to the emperor Augustus, who, being without arms, could,
notwithstanding, wield a bow and arrows and put a trumpet to his mouth
with his feet.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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