In Europe by degrees the harmless were-wolf entirely disappeared but the evil one survived. The superstition of lycanthropy concentrated round one point (as superstitions often do): the self-transformation of a perverse man or sorcerer into an animal for nefarious purposes. The object of the transformation might be the opportunity for giving free range to sanguinary appetites; but there was another object lurking in the background, and this was the acquirement of second sight, which some animals (if not all) are supposed to be endowed with. Just as Varro and Virgil believed in lycanthropy, so the most highly educated Europeans in the time of Louis XIV. and after, believed in were-wolves. The choice of the animal was immaterial, but it fell naturally on the most prominent and feared wild animal which was locally extant. A fancy or exotic animal would not do, which illustrates the link there is between popular beliefs and _facts_; distorted facts, it may be, but real and not imaginary things. If a bear of bad morals appears in Norway, people declare that it can be “no Christian bear”—it must be a Lapp or a Finn, both these peoples, who are much addicted to magic, being supposed to have the power of changing into bears when they choose. Instead of seeking the wild beast in man, people sought the man in the wild beast. As in Asia so in Europe, it was noticed and pondered that the normal wild beast is dangerous, perhaps, but not from a human point of view perverse. The normal wolf like the normal tiger does not attack or destroy for the love of destruction. Wolves attack in packs, but the instinct of the single individual is to keep out of man’s way. He does not kill even animals indiscriminately. In the last times when there were wolves in the Italian valleys of the Alps, the news spread that a wolf had killed a number of sheep. What had really happened was this, which an old hunter told at Edolo to a relative of mine. The wolf jumped down into a sheepfold sunk in the ground. He killed a sheep and ate some of it and then found, to his dismay, that he could not get up the wall of the sheepfold. Nothing daunted, however, he killed a sufficient number of sheep to form a mound, up which he climbed and so effected his escape. No one thought such a clever wolf as this a _lupo manaro_. But some wolves, like some dogs, are subject to fits of mental alienation, in which they slay without rhyme or reason. Sheep are found killed all over the countryside, and men or children may be among the victims. The question arises of who did it—a wolf, a man, or both in one? The material fact is there, and it is a fact calculated to excite terror, surprise, curiosity. That the fact may remain always a mystery recent experience shows. When the were-wolf mania was rampant in France, honestly conducted judicial inquiry succeeded in a few cases, in tracing the outrages to a real wolf or to a real man. At last, in 1603, a French