Many animal demons are mere fables for the ferocity of human tribes. The Were-wolf superstition, which exists still in Russia, where the transformed monster is called volkodlák (volk, a wolf, and dlak, hair), might even have originated in the costume of Norse barbarians and huntsmen. The belief was always more or less rationalised, resembling that held by Verstegan three hundred years ago, and which may be regarded as prevalent among both the English and Flemish people of his day. 'These Were-wolves,' he says, 'are certain sorcerers, who, having anointed their bodies with an ointment they make by the instinct of the devil, and putting on a certain enchanted girdle, do not only unto the view of others seem as wolves, but to their own thinking have both the nature and shape of wolves so long as they wear the said girdle; and they do dispose themselves as very wolves, in worrying and killing, and waste of human creatures.' During the Franco-German war of 1870-71, a family of ladies on the German side of the Rhine, sitting up all night in apprehension, related to me such stories of the 'Turcos' that I have since found no difficulty in understanding the belief in weird and præternatural wolves which once filled Europe with horror. The facility with which the old Lycian wolf-girdle, so to say, was caught up and worn in so many countries where race-wars were chronic for many ages, renders it nearly certain that this superstition (Lycanthropy), however it may have originated, was continued through the custom of ascribing demonic characteristics to hostile and fierce races. It has been, indeed, a general opinion that the theoretical belief originated in the Pythagorean doctrine of metempsychosis. Thus Shakspere:-- Thou almost makest me waver in my faith, To hold opinion with Pythagoras, That souls of animals infuse themselves Into the trunks of men: thy currish spirit Governed a wolf, who, hanged for human slaughter, Even from the gallows did his fell soul fleet, And whilst thou layest in thy unhallowed dam Infused itself in thee; for thy desires Are wolfish, bloody, starved, and ravenous. But the superstition is much older than Pythagoras, who, no doubt, tried to turn it into a moral theory of retributions,--as indeed did Plato in his story of the Vision of Er the Armenian.