It is true that certain arbitrary lines may be drawn to localise the witch proper, even though the rules be chiefly made up of exceptions. Thus she is, for the most part, feminine. The Scots male-witch, and those elsewhere occurrent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, might as correctly be termed wizards or warlocks, for any absolute proof to the contrary. The witch, again, has seldom risen to such heights in the profession as have her male competitors. The magician belongs, as we have seen, to a later stage of human development than does the witch, but, once evolved, he soon left her far behind; it is true that he was able to avail himself of the store of knowledge by her so slowly and painfully acquired. With its aid he soon raised himself to the highest rank in the profession--approaching it from the scientific standpoint, and leaving her to muddle along empirically and by rule of thumb. Nor was he content until he had made himself master of the Devil--using Satan and all his imps for his own private ends--while the less enterprising witch never rose to be more than the Devil's servant, or at best his humble partner in ill-doing. The Magician, whatsoever his own private failings, has certainly deserved well of posterity. Just as the quack and the Bond Street sybil are representatives of the witch in the direct line, so, from the alchemist and the sorcerer are descended the great scientists of our own day--an impious brood indeed, who deny that their own father was aught but an impostor and a charlatan. The proprietor of, let us say, "Dr. Parabole's Pellets," is own brother--illegitimate though he be--to the discoverer of the Röntgen ray. The researches of the old-time sorcerer into the Forbidden, whatever their immediate profit, at least pointed out the direction for more profitable researches. Merlin, Cornelius Agrippa, or Albertus Magnus, had they been born in our day, would certainly have achieved the Fellowship of the Royal Society--and with good reason. It is to the search after the philosopher's stone and the elixir vitæ that we owe the discovery of radium. It was only by calling in the aid of the Devil that mankind acquired the prescience of a God.