A friend to whom I showed the spiracle of
the house-fly, exclaimed in astonishment that
nature had taken more pains with those
insignificant creatures than with us.

One great merit of modern microscopes is
their portability; if the reader wish to test
their attractiveness, let him arrive some
rainy day at a country house full of company,
when the guests are prevented from enjoying
out-door amusements. Let him there
produce one of Amadio's forty-guinea
instruments, with the polarizing and dark-ground
apparatus complete, accompanied by a
boxfull of good preparations, and he will work
wonders.

THE WITCHES OF ENGLAND.

WITCHCRAFT in England was very much the
same thing as witchcraft everywhere else.
The same rites were gone through, and the
same ceremonies observed; and "Little
Martin," whether as a goat with a man's
voice, or a man with a goat's legs, received
the same homage from the English witches
as he did at Blockula and at Auldearne,
on Walpurgis night in Germany, and
All-Hallowmas-een in Scotland. Indeed the
uniformity of practice and belief was one
of the most singular phenomena of this
wonderful delusion; and widely different as
every social habit and observance might be
between (for instance) Sweden and Scotland,
the customs and creed of the witch population
are found to be singularly uniform. Ditches
dug with their nails and filled with the blood
of a black lamb; images of clay or wax
"pricked to the quick;" unchristened children
dug up from the grave and parted into lots
for charms; perforated stones; ancient
relics; herbs, chiefly poisonous or medicinal;
toads and loathsome insects; strange unusual
matters, such as the bones of a green frog, a
cat's brains, owl's eyes and eggs, bats' wings,
and so forth; these were, in all countries, more
or less prominent in the alphabet of sorcery.
While everywhere it was believed that witches
could control the elements, command the
fruits of the earth, transform themselves
and others into what animals they would,
bewitch by spells and muttered charms,
and conjure up the devil at will; that they
possessed familiars whom they nourished on
their own bodies; that they denied their
baptismal vows, and took on them the
sacraments of the devil; that they were
bound to deliver to their master a certain
tale of victims, generally unborn or
unchristened infants; that they could creep
through keyholes; make straws and
broom-handles into horses: that they were all
marked on their second or infernal baptism,
which mark was known by being insensible
to the "pricking pin;" that while this mark
was undiscovered, they had the power of
denial or silence, but that on its discovery
the charm was broken, and they must perforce
confess—which was the meaning of the
searching, pricking, and shaving practised on
suspected witches; that they could not shed
tears, or at best no more than three from the
left eye; and that, if they were "swum," the
water, being the sacred element used in Christian
baptism, would reject them from its bosom
and leave them floating on the surface. Such
at least was the theory respecting the alleged
buoyancy of witches, and the original meaning
of that cruel custom. These articles of
faith are to be found, with very little modification
wherever witches and warlocks formed
part of the social creed, and their habits and
peculiarities were catalogued, credited, and
made the rule of life. There were three
classes of witches distinguished, like jockeys
in a race, by their colours. White witches
were helpful and beneficent. They charmed
away diseases; they assisted tired Industry
in its work, and caused stolen goods to be
restored; but they were not averse to a little
harmless mischief. Dryden sings:

        At least as little honest as he could;
        And, like white witches, mischievously good.

Black witches did nothing but harm; and
gray witches capriciously did good at one
time, and evil at another.

The Duchess of Gloucester, proud and dark
Dame Eleanor , was among the earliest of our
notable witches. After her, came Jane Shore;
though, in both these instances (as with Lady
Glammis and Euphemia Macalzean) so much
of party and personal feeling was mixed up
with the charge of witchcraft, that we can
scarcely determine now, how much was real
superstition and how much political enmity.
The Duke of Buckingham in fifteen hundred
and twenty-one, and Lord Hungerford a few
years later, were also high names to be taken
to the scaffold on the charge of trafficking
with sorcerers; while the Maid of Kent,
Mildred Norrington the Maid of Westall,
and Richard Dugdale the Surrey impostor,
were all cases of possession rather than of
true witchcraft: though all three were afterwards
confessed to be proved cheats. In
fifteen hundred and ninety-three, the
terrible tragedy of the Witches of Warbois was
played before the world; and with that
begins our record of English witchcraft,
properly so called.

In the parish of Warbois lived an old man
and his wife, called Samuel, with their only
daughter: a young, and, as it would seem,
high-spirited and courageous woman. One
of the daughters of a Mr. Throgmorton, seeing
Mother Samuel in a black knitted cap,
and being nervous and unwell at the time,
took a fancy to say that she had bewitched
her; and her younger sisters, taking up the
cry, there was no help for the Samuels but
to brand them as malignant sorcerers. The
Throgmorton children said they were haunted
by nine spirits, "Pluck, Hardname, Catch,
Blue, and three Smacks, cousins." One of