Some twenty years ago it was not unusual in the south of Ireland to see boys assembled about a fire of straw, loudly exulting over a flame-surrounded victim, whose attempts to escape, rendered nugatory by a timid retraction as it were into himself, served but to call forth louder shouts of triumph from his persecutors, who thought they justified their savage deed by proclaiming its hapless object as a witch, a robber of orchards, and a sucker of cows. Leaving to our antiquarian friends to discover whether the cruel act in question was not a holocaust originating in the mystic rites of Pagan times, it is for us to vindicate the wronged, and show the absurdity of the charges by which wrong has been maintained, and at the same time to indicate such matter as may serve to direct kindness to that innocent victim of ignorance, the inoffensive Hedgehog. That it is not a witch according to the old law, may be proved in a court of justice spite of the popular opinion and in defiance of the authority of Shakspeare, whose witches in Macbeth are warned that the proper time had come to commence their infernal incantations by “thrice and once the hedge-pig whined.” We have no witness that a hedgehog ever rode a broomstick or vomited knives, skewers, coals of fire, or any such like legal proofs of witchcraft; neither, perhaps you exclaim, is the writer of so much nonsense a witch. True it is that the creature so named has its place nowhere in the classification of a zoologist, yet still an undefined idea of its existence floats in the imagination of the most ignorant, and it is not _extraordinary_ that an opinion once universal should still linger in unenlightened minds. In no way do we consider superstitious prejudices can better be extinguished than by inducing accuracy of observation of natural phenomena, which shows that nothing supernatural exists. The second charge, that the hedgehog is a robber of orchards, is a very old one. Pliny, as translated by Holland, states--“Hedgehogs make their provision beforehand of meat for winter in this wise: they wallow and roll themselves upon apples and such fruit lying under foot, and so catch them up with their prickles, and one more besides they take in their mouth, and so carry them into hollow trees.”