When Spenser tells us it was said of the Irish, as of the Scythians, how they were once a year turned into wolves, “though Master Camden in a better sense doth suppose it was the disease called Lycanthropia,”—he adds these remarkable words, “yet some of the Irish do use to make the wolf their gossip.” Now it must be observed that gossip is not here used in its secondary meaning of a talking, tattling, or tippling companion, but in its original import, though wickedly detorted here: “Our Christian ancestors,” says Verstegan, “understanding a spiritual affinity to grow between the parents and such as undertook for the child at baptism, called each other by the name of God-sib, which is as much as to say as that they were _sib_ together, that is, of kin together, through God.” The Limerick schoolmaster whose words are transcribed by Camden, says, “they receive wolves as gossips, calling them _Chari-Christ_, praying for them, and wishing them happy; upon which account they are not afraid of them.” There was great store of wolves in Ireland at that time; and the Doctor asked whether so strange a custom could be satisfactorily explained in any way but by a blind consciousness of physical affinity,—by supposing that those who chose wolves to be godfathers and godmothers for their children, had in the preceding stage of their own existence been wolves themselves? How triumphantly would he have appealed to a story which Captain Beaver relates in his African Memoranda. “In the evening” says that most enterprising, resolute, able, and right minded man, “two or three of the grumetas came to me and said that Francisco, one of their party, was not a good man: that he wanted to eat one of them, John Basse, who had been this day taken very ill. As I could not comprehend what they meant by saying that one of them wanted to eat another, I sent for Johnson to explain. He said that the man accused of eating the other was a witch, and that he was the cause of John Basse's illness, by sucking his blood with his infernal witchcraft; and that these people had come to request that I would let them tie him to a tree and flog him, after they had finished their work. I told them that there was no such thing as a witch; that it was impossible for this man to suck the blood of another, by any art which he could possibly possess; that he could not be the cause of another man's illness by such means; and that with respect to flogging, no one punished on the island but myself. Johnson who is as bigotted in this instance as any of them, says that he is well known to be a witch; that he has killed many people with his infernal art, and that this is the cause of his leaving his own country, where if he should ever be caught, he would be sold as a slave; and that he with difficulty had prevented the other grumetas from throwing him overboard on their passage from Bissao hither. Johnson moreover told me that there was