While Drake says this record of "the examination is valuable" for "the light it throws on the commencement of the delusion," he also calls it a "record of incoherent nonsense." The public very narrowly escaped loss of opportunity to get at the important and luminous facts contained in this document. Drake, in 1866, says, "The original (now for the first time printed) came into the editor's hands some five and twenty years since," at which time, "on a first and cursory perusal of the examination of the Indian woman belonging to Mr. Parris's family, it was concluded not to print it, and only refer to it; that is, only refer to the _extract_ from it contained in the HISTORY AND ANTIQUITIES OF BOSTON. But when editorial labors upon these volumes were nearly completed, a re-perusal of that examination was made, and the result determined the editor to give it a place in this Appendix." We are constrained to doubt whether this editor attained to anything like either fair comprehension of the value of this document even upon its re-perusal, or that he perceived one half the import which facts fairly give to the following words from his pen: "The record of this examination _throws light on the commencement of the delusion_." Yes, light upon the time, place, source, and nature of that commencement, and which also discloses who was the originating, and probably the guiding agent of all that witchcraft's subsequent process up to its culmination--light which, to great extent, exculpates both the fathers and their children--light which reveals the true actors and exonerates their _unconscious_ instruments. That document, read, as it now can be, with help from modern revealments, proves that some spirit, or a band of spirits, was witchcraft's generator and enactor at Salem, and indicates that simple Tituba comprehended the genuine source of the disturbance more clearly than did any other known person of that generation. She furnished for transmission a key that now unlocks the door of the chamber of mystery, in which she and her associates were made to enact thrilling and bloody scenes one hundred and eighty years ago.