"Cette tradition qui m'a été signalée par mon savant collegue, M. Depping, est rapportée dans les _Lusitanian Sketches_, et dans _Le Portugal de M. Ferd. Denis_." "Autrefois la Prusse, la Lithuanie, la Livonie fourmillaient de Sorciers qui passaient pour se métamorphoser en loups quand ils vouloient." In the same paper, "Recherches sur la Lycanthropie," we have a great deal more on the subject, too long to extract for this note. In the middle ages, it is stated that the laws were very strict and rigorous against all who were accused of this singular species of sorcery. They were feared and hated as the most dangerous and ferocious of murderers, and when taken were burnt alive. About 1436, at Berne, a great number of sorcerers were burnt alive, who confessed that they were obedient to the devil, and, by means of certain ointments, were able to transform themselves, and that they had devoured their own children. In 1574, before the Parliament of Dôle, a "Procès de Lycanthropie" was tried against Gilles Garnier, a sorcerer, of Lyons. He was condemned and burnt. The 3rd of December, 1573, the Parliament of Franche Comté issued an order for a "Chasse de Loups-garous." From 1596 to 1600, a great number of men and women suffered the punishment of fire as Lycanthropes and Demonolâtres. In the capacity of judge, Jean Boquet showed such intense zeal against them, that, at the close of his life, he boasted, says Voltaire, of having himself caused more than six hundred Lycanthropes to perish.--_Boquet Disc. des Sorciers, &c._ 1603. _Voltaire, Œuvres completes._ Ed. Baudmin, t. 39. The subject was preached upon from the altar; learned dissertations were written and published as to whether the fact of men being able to transform themselves into beasts were true or no. At the close of this paper the author gives his own opinion as to whether the transformation of men into beasts be admissible; and in all the facts produced by writers and preserved by tradition, how much is reality, trickery, or imagination. To the first question, we need hardly say, he answers in the negative; to the second, our answer is, that certain facts set down to Lycanthropy have been really accomplished by true wolves, or men in a state of savage nature; 2ndly, others have been contrived by popular imaginations, or by deceivers, whether to terrify or to delude; 3rdly, the greater number of the facts have been caused by affections of the brain in the pretended loups-garous, by that black melancholy already described by the physicians of antiquity--in a word, by madness. _Note 3._ Page 103.