from a wound at the neck, and horses standing in their stalls trembling, covered with white foam, and so thoroughly terrified as to become unfit for use. Another period of excitement due to accounts of vampirism comprised the middle of last century, when all Europe was deeply agitated on the subject. The Emperor of Germany and other monarchs appointed committees of learned men to investigate the matter; theologians and skeptics, philosophers and physicians, took up the discussion, and hundreds of volumes were published on the mysterious question, but no satisfactory result was ever obtained. Many declared the whole a fable or merely the effect of diseased imaginations, others looked upon it as a malignant and epidemic disease, and not a few as the unmistakable work of the devil. Learned men searched the writings of antiquity, and soon found more traces of the fearful disease than they had expected. They discovered that in Thessaly, Epirus, and some parts of the Pieria, men were reported by ancient writers as wandering about at night and tearing all whom they met to pieces. The Lamiæ of the Greeks and the Strigæ of the Romans evidently belonged to the same category, while the later Tympanites of the Greeks were persons who had died while under the ban of the church and were therefore doomed to become vampires. The Slavic population of Moravia and Bohemia was in those days especially rich in instances of vampirism, and so many occurred in Hungary that the Emperor Charles IV. intrusted the investigation of the matter to a prince of Würtemberg, before whom a number of cases were fully authenticated. Men who had died years before, were seen to return to their former homes, some in the daytime, some at night, and the following morning those whom they had visited were found dead and weltering in their blood. In a single village seventeen persons died thus within three months, and in many instances, when bodies were disinterred, they were found looking quite alive. At this time the Sorbonne at Paris also took up the subject, but came to no conclusion, save that they disapproved of the practice of disinterring bodies, "because vampires, as cataleptics, might be restored to life by bleeding or magnetic treatment," according to the opinion of the learned Dr. Piérard. (_Revue Spirit._, iv.)