Reginald Scot gives the reasons alleged by the apologists of witchcraft. 'This gift and natural influence of fascination may be increased in man according to his affections and perturbations, as through anger, fear, love, hate, &c. For by hate, saith Varius, entereth a fiery inflammation into the eye of man, which being violently sent out by beams and streams infect and bewitch those bodies against whom they are opposed. And therefore (he saith) that is the cause that women are oftener found to be witches than men. For they have such an unbridled force of fury and concupiscence naturally, that by no means is it possible for them to temper or moderate the same. So as upon every trifling occasion they, like unto the beasts, fix their furious eyes upon the party whom they bewitch.... Women also (saith he) are oftenlie filled full of superfluous humours, and with them the melancholike blood boileth, whereof spring vapours, and are carried up and conveyed through the nostrils and mouth, to the bewitching of whatsoever it meeteth. For they belch up a certain breath wherewith they bewitch whomsoever they list. And of all other women lean, hollow-eyed, old, beetle-browed women (saith he) are the most infectious.'[44] Why _old_ women are selected as the most proper means of doing the devil's will may be discovered in their peculiar characteristics. The repulsive features, moroseness, avarice, malice, garrulity of his hags are said to be appropriate instruments. Scot informs us, 'One sort of such as are said to be witches are women which be commonly old, lame, blear-eyed, pale, foul, and full of wrinkles, poor, sullen, superstitious, and _papists_, or such as know no religion, in whose drowsy minds the devil hath got a fine seat. They are lean and deformed, showing melancholy in their faces, to the horror of all that see them. They are doting, scolds, mad, devilish ... neither obtaining for their service and pains, nor yet by their art, nor yet at the devil's hands, with whom they are said to make a perfect visible bargain, either beauty, money, promotion, wealth, worship, pleasure, honour, knowledge, or any other benefit whatsoever.' As to the preternatural gifts of these hags, he sensibly argues: 'Alas! what an unapt instrument is a toothless, old, impotent, unwieldy woman to fly in the air; truly, the devil little needs such instruments to bring his purposes to pass.'[45] [44] _Discoverie of Witchcraft_, book xii. 21.--We shall have occasion hereafter to notice this great opponent of the devil's regime in the sixteenth century. We may be inclined to consider a more probable reason--that spirits, being in the general belief (so Adam infers that God had 'peopled highest heaven with spirits masculine') of the masculine gender, the recipients of their inspiration are naturally of the other sex: evil spirits could propagate their human or half-human agents with least suspicion and in the most natural way.