That the world abounded in former ages, and from the remotest periods, with jugglers and other sorts of artful impostors, who pretended to the knowledge of future events and other secrets, and so supported themselves and acquired great names by working upon the weakness, or imposing upon the credulity of mankind, is well known. Being of different sorts they went under different names, according to their respective pretensions, or peculiar, apparent, or professed modes of proceeding. Hence we speak of them under the various appellations of magicians, sorcerers, diviners, conjurers, witches and wizards, &c. each, or most of which denote a certain distinction of character or operation. {732} There were among them from the earliest times ventriloquists and consummate jugglers, well skilled in the arts of dexterity, or slight of hand tricks, and their operations served, (as real miracles did with the true prophets,) to gain credit to their declarations and pretensions. Thus their high and solemn professions, with the aid of gastriloquy, legerdemain or juggling, obtained credit in the world, so as to establish their character or fame, and perpetuate the delusion. Falshood assumed the name or place of truth, and fiction that of reality: and those who were thus taken in, or imposed upon, have always with difficulty been undeceived. Formerly the names of magicians, sorcerers, witches, &c. were appropriated to those only who avowed or professed themselves to be such; but latterly, or in more recent times, they seem to have been chiefly, if not entirely appropriated to those who did _not_ make such an avowal or profession, and who even disclaimed any such imputation or pretension. And, what is exceedingly remarkable, those who were uncommonly knowing, and those who were uncommonly ignorant became now equally the objects of suspicion, and were of course included under one or another of those appellations; as if extraordinary intelligence and extraordinary stupidity equally indicated an alliance or confederacy with the devil. Such men as _Roger Bacon_ and _Galileo_, the most enlightened of their species, were more than suspected to be _sorcerers_, and multitudes of poor creatures, mostly old women, who were no way distinguished from the rest of the community, except by their extreme poverty, or extreme ignorance, have been treated in the most brutal manner, and in the end burnt or hanged, under the opprobrious name of _witches_—in the infamy of which conduct, as we have shewn, this town is deeply implicated.