Both the St. Vitus’s dance and Tarantism belonged to the ages in which they appeared. They could not have existed under the same latitude at any other epoch, for at no other period were the circumstances which prepared the way for them combined in a similar relation to each other, and the mental as well as corporeal temperaments of nations, which depend on causes such as have been stated, are as little capable of renewal as the different stages of life in individuals. This gives so much the more importance to a disease but cursorily alluded to in the foregoing pages, which exists in Abyssinia, and which nearly resembles the original mania of the St. John’s dancers, inasmuch as it exhibits a perfectly similar ecstacy, with the same violent effect on the nerves of motion. It occurs most frequently in the Tigrè country, being thence called Tigretier, and is probably the same malady which is called in the Æthiopian language Astarāgaza[317]. On this subject we will introduce the testimony of Nathaniel Pearce[318], an eye-witness, who resided nine years in Abyssinia. “The Tigretier,” says he, “is more common among the women than among the men. It seizes the body as if with a violent fever, and from that turns to a lingering sickness, which reduces the patients to skeletons, and often kills them, if the relations cannot procure the proper remedy. During this sickness their speech is changed to a kind of stuttering, which no one can understand but those afflicted with the same disorder. When the relations find the malady to be the real _tigretier_, they join together to defray the expenses of curing it; the first remedy they in general attempt, is to procure the assistance of a learned Dofter, who reads the Gospel of St. John[319], and drenches the patient with cold water daily for the space of seven days—an application that very often proves fatal. The most effectual cure, though far more expensive than the former, is as follows:—The relations hire, for a certain sum of money, a band of trumpeters, drummers and fifers, and buy a quantity of liquor; then all the young men and women of the place assemble at the patient’s house, to perform the following most extraordinary ceremony.