But it is not to the criminal classes alone that superstitions of this nature belong. Of the alchemy, magic, black art, sorcery, and "philosophy" of the Dark Ages of Europe, the practice of which lingered in some places well on into the seventeenth century, horrible stories are told, in which children, their bodies, their souls even, appear as fetishes. The baptism of blood is said still to be practised in parts of Russia by parents "to preserve their child from the temptations of the prince of darkness," and in 1874, "a country-school teacher of the Strassburg district, and his wife, upon the advice of a somnambulist, struck their own aunt with the fire-tongs until the blood flowed, with which they sprinkled their child supposed to have been bewitched by her" (361. 73). Here it is the blood of adults that is used, but the practice demands the child's also. According to C. F. A. Hoffmann (1817), there lived in Naples "an old doctor who had children by several women, which he inhumanly killed, with peculiar ceremonies and rites, cutting the breast open, tearing out the heart, and from its blood preparing precious drops which were preservative against all sickness." Well known is the story of Elizabeth Bathori, a Hungarian woman of the early part of the seventeenth century, who, it is said, receiving on her face a drop of blood which spurted from a waiting-girl whose ears she had severely boxed, and noticing afterward, when she wiped it away, that her skin at that spot appeared to be more beautiful, whiter, and finer than before, resolved to bathe her face and her whole body in human blood, in order to increase her charms and her beauty. Before her monstrous actions were discovered, she is thought to have caused the death of some 650 girls with the aid of accomplices (361. 46). _Fetiches of Religion._ The use of human blood in ritual has been treated of in detail by Strack, and in his pages many references to children will be found. He also discusses in detail the charge of the Anti-Semitics that the Jews kill little children of their Christian neighbours for the purpose of using their blood and certain parts of their bodies in religious rites and ceremonies, showing alike the antiquity of this libel as well as its baselessness. Against the early Christians like charges appear to have been made by the heathen, and later on by the Saracens; and indeed, this charge is one which is generally levelled at new-comers or innovators in the early history of Christian religion and civilization. Strack points out also that, during the contest of the Dominicans and Franciscans in Bern, in 1507 A.D., it was charged that the former used the blood of Jewish children, the eyebrows and hair of children, etc., in their secret rites (361. 68, 69).