Thus did our ‘British Solomon’, James I, commence his _Daemonologia_ (1598), a work directed against the two men who alone up to that time had made a bold and open protest against the witch mania and its abominations. Reginald Scot in his _Discovery of Witchcraft_ (1584) took the view of a modern common-sense Englishman, that the whole thing is absurd, a mixture of roguery and false accusations. Weyer, on the other hand, his predecessor by twenty years, is a firm believer in the activity of the devil, whose object, however, is not to get possession of the souls of crazy old women, but by deluding them, to convert pious and learned lawyers and theologians into torturers and murderers. Born about 1516 at Grave in Brabant, the son of a dealer in hops and faggots, Weyer was acquainted with the supernatural from his earliest years, for they had a domestic ‘house cobold’ or _Poltergeist_, who was heard tumbling the hop-sacks about whenever a customer was expected. At seventeen years of age the boy was sent to study medicine as apprentice to Cornelius Agrippa, an extraordinary man, long held to be a sorcerer, who had recently incurred yet stronger suspicion by his heroic and successful defence of a woman accused of witchcraft at Metz, and by his fondness for a black dog called ‘Monsieur’ which scarcely ever left him. The young Weyer used to take this animal out on a string, and soon became convinced, to use his own words, that it was ‘a perfectly natural male dog’.[317] He next went to Paris and thence to Orleans, a university then famous for its medical school, where he took the degree of M.D. in 1537. He commenced practice in Brabant, became public medical officer at Arnheim in 1545, and in 1550 physician to Duke William of Cleves. In 1563 he published his great work _De praestigiis daemonum et incantationibus ac veneficiis_,[318] the object of which is to show that so-called witchcraft is usually due to delusions of demons, who take advantage of the weaknesses and diseases of women to bring about impious and absurd superstitions, hatreds, cruelties, and a vast outpouring of innocent blood, things in which they naturally delight.