The numerous other instances of harm wrought by witches with which he is acquainted, such as the raising of storms, thefts of milk, eggs and butter,[1159] the laying of snares to entrap men, tears of blood that flow from the eyes, lizards cast up from the stomach,[1160] etc., all recede into the background in comparison with the harlotry, substitution of children, etc., which the devil carries out with the witches’ help. “It is quite possible that, as the story goes, the Evil Spirit can carnally know the sorceresses, get them with child and cause all manner of mischief.”[1161] Changeling children of the sort are nothing but a “lump of flesh without a soul”; the devil is the soul, as Luther says elsewhere,[1162] for which reason he declared, in 1541, such children should simply be drowned; he recalls how he had already given this advice in one such case at Dessau, viz. that such a child, then twelve years of age, should be smothered.[1163] It sometimes happens, so he says, that animals, cats for instance, intent on doing harm, are wounded and that afterwards the witches are found to have wounds in the same part of the body. In such case the animals were all sham.[1164] A mouse trying to steal milk is hurt somewhere, and the next day the witch comes and begs for oil for the wound which she has in the very same place.[1165] If milk and butter are placed on coals the devil, he says, will be obliged to call up the witches who did the mischief.[1166] “It is also said that people who eat butter that has been bewitched, eat nothing but mud.”[1167] In such metamorphoses into animals it was not, however, the witches who underwent the change, nor were the animals really hurt, but it was “the devil who transformed himself into the animal” which was only apparently wounded; afterwards, however, “he imprints the marks of the wounds on the women so as to make them believe they had taken part in the occurrence.”[1168] At any rate this is the curiously involved explanation he once gives of the difficult problem. In some passages he, like others too, is reluctant to accept the theory that afterwards grew so prevalent, particularly during the witch persecutions in the 17th century, viz. that the witches were in the habit of flying through the air. In 1540 he says that this, like the changes mentioned above, was merely conjured up before the mind by the devil, and was thus a delusion of the senses and a Satanic deception.[1169] Yet in 1538 he assumes that it was in Satan’s power to carry those who had surrendered themselves to him bodily through the air;[1170] he had heard of one instance where even repentance and confession could not save such a man, when at the point of death, from being carried off by the devil. At an earlier date he had spoken without any hesitation of the witches who ride “on goats and broom-sticks and travel on mantles.”[1171]