“Then you question the relation. That alters the case. Let us take, then, the case, also well attested, of the nuns of Uvertet, which, about 1550, caused for a long time so much astonishment in Brandenburg, Holland, Italy, and especially in Germany. The nuns were at first awakened and startled by plaintive moanings.... Sometimes they were dragged from their beds, and along the floor, as if drawn by their legs.... Their arms and lower extremities were twisted in every direction.... Sometimes they bounded in the air and fell with violence upon the ground.... In moments in which they appeared to enjoy a perfect calm, they would suddenly fall backwards and be deprived of speech.... Some of them, on the contrary, would amuse themselves in climbing to the tops of trees, when they would descend, their feet in the air and their heads down. These attacks began to lose their violence after a duration of three years. A very singular madness this, which, as the _Dictionnaire des Sciences Médicales_ says, ‘extended over _all_ the convents of women in Germany, particularly in Saxony and Brandenburg, and gained even Holland,’ and it might have added, also, Italy. ‘All the miracles,’ it continues, ‘of the Convulsionaires, or of Animal Magnetism, were familiar to these nonnains, who were regarded as possessed. They all foretold future events, leaped and capered, ran up the sides of walls, spoke foreign languages, &c.’ You may read the fourteen well authenticated cases recorded by Cotton Mather in his Magnalia, and you will find that all these, and similar phenomena, were exhibited by the bewitched or possessed in Massachusetts near the close of the seventeenth century, and known under the name of ‘Salem witchcraft,’ though only a portion of them occurred in that famous town. Do you include all these under the head of insanity?” “Cotton Mather was a pedant, vain, arrogant, and ambitious of power, and I did not expect to hear him cited as an authority,” replied the Doctor, in evident vexation. “Cotton Mather,” Mr. Merton replied, “was one of the most learned and distinguished men in New England in his time, and, though I am of another parish, I respect his memory. I do not cite his opinions; I merely cite him as the recorder of facts which either he himself had witnessed with his own eyes, or which had been confessed or proved before the courts of the colony, and thus far at least his authority is sufficient. But I will ask you to explain on your hypothesis the phenomena exhibited by the Ursuline Nuns of Loudun, France, in the seventeenth century, and the authenticity of which both Bertrand and Calmeil, as well as others, admit were triumphantly vindicated.”