[609]. “On the enactment of the statute to repeal the law, vanished all those imaginary powers so absurdly attributed to old women oppressed with age and poverty.”—H. Arnot, Criminal Trials, p. 369.
[610]. The late Mr. Gurney, of the Psychical Research Society, found, after a most extensive investigation, “a total absence of respectable evidence, and an almost total absence of any first-hand evidence at all, for those phenomena of magic and witchcraft which cannot be accounted for as the results of diseased imagination, hysteria, hypnotism, and occasionally, perhaps, telepathy.”—Phantasms of the Living, i. p. 172.
[611]. See E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture, ii. p. 130.
[612]. J. B. Tuke in the Ency. Brit.
[613]. E. Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, i. p. 269.
[614]. Westermarck, Moral Ideas, i. p. 270.
[615]. E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture, ii. p. 117.
[616]. See, for instance, the story called “The Sleeper Awakened” in the Arabian Nights.
[617]. The severities to which the insane were subjected by various tribes are mentioned by Westermarck in Moral Ideas, i. p. 271.
[618]. John Conolly, Treatment of the Insane, p. 4. London, 1856.