The scholar, rhetorician, statistician, fictionist, and dramatist, all blend harmoniously in him, give an uncommon charm to his "History of Salem Village," and render it a work which bespeaks wide and abiding interest with the public. It is no essential part of the philosopher's specific labors to discover or test new agents, forces, or facts. His dealings mostly are with facts known and admitted. Till one concedes the fact of spirit action upon persons and things in earth life, he cannot philosophically admit that spirit forces were ever employed in the production of any phenomenon, but must regard all as purely material or within the scope of ordinary human faculties. Therefore we can, perhaps, with propriety regard our friend as also a philosopher; but must add, that he either lacked knowledge of or ignored the agents and forces that produced many witchcraft phenomena which he attempted to elucidate, and many others of the same character which he failed to adduce from the earlier records; which agents and forces must be allowed their actual and full connection with their own effects before philosophy can furnish just, clear, and satisfactory solutions of their source and nature. MARGARET JONES. The great endemic witchcraft at Salem Village in 1692 has been extensively ascribed to the voluntary acts of a few girls and women, who are sometimes credited with having derived much knowledge from books, traditions, weird stories, and the like, and thus obtained hints and instructions whereby they were enabled to devise, and, acting upon the credulity and infatuation of their time, to enact, and did enact, that great and thrilling performance, without supermundane aid. Was it so? An examination of several sporadic cases which preceded that famous outburst of mysterious operations, may indicate strong need to assign many witchcraft manifestations to causes and forces lying off beyond the reach of man's ordinary faculties, for we perceive in them the operation of powers which he never acquired, nor can acquire, by reading, listening, or by any training processes. Hutchinson says, "The great noise which the New England witchcraft made throughout the English dominions proceeded more from the general panic with which all sorts of persons were seized, and an expectation that the contagion would spread to all parts of the country, than from the number of persons who were executed; more having been put to death in a single county in England in a short space of time, than have suffered in New England from the first settlement until the present time. Fifteen years had passed before we find any mention of witchcraft among the English colonists.... The first suspicion of witchcraft among the English was about the year 1645." We commence now an examination of several of the earlier cases, and begin with MARGARET JONES.