CHAPTER CXXVIII.
ELUCIDATIONS OF THE COLUMBIAN THEORY.
Thou almost makest me waver in my faith
To hold opinion with Pythagoras,
That souls of animals infuse themselves
Into the trunks of men.
MERCHANT OF VENICE.
Many facts in illustration or exemplification of the Doctor's theory concerning progressive existence must have occurred to every one within the circle of his own observations. One of the scientific persons who abridged the Philosophical Transactions says, he “was acquainted with a medical practitioner of considerable eminence who could not refrain from eating toasted cheese, though he was subject to an alarming pulmonary complaint which was uniformly aggravated by it, and which terminated fatally at an age by no means advanced.” This practitioner, the Doctor would have said, had been either a mouse or a rat, and in that pre-existent form had nibbled at such a bait,—perhaps once too often. This would account for the propensity even if he were not a Welshman to boot.
The same author says “there is now living a physician of my acquaintance who at an autumnal dessert, never ceases eating all the filberts he can lay his hands upon, although he very candidly acknowledges that they are extremely indigestible and hurtful things.” Upon the Doctor's theory, who can doubt that he had been a squirrel?
“I remember,” says a certain Mr. George Garden in a letter written from Aberdeen in 1676, “when Mrs. Scougall and I were with you last summer, we had occasion to speak of a man in this country very remarkable for something peculiar in his temper, that inclines him to imitate unawares all the gestures and motions of those with whom he converses. We then had never seen him ourselves. Since our return we were together at Strathbogie where he dwells, and notwithstanding all we had heard of him before, were somewhat surprized with the oddness of this dotterel quality. This person named Donald Munro, being a little old and very plain man, of a thin slender body, has been subject to this infirmity, as he told us, from his very infancy. He is very loath to have it observed, and therefore casts down his eyes when he walks in the streets, and turns them aside when he is in company. We had made several trials before he perceived our design, and afterwards had much ado to make him stay. We caressed him as much as we could, and had then the opportunity to observe that he imitated not only the scratching of the head, but also the wringing of the hands, wiping of the nose, stretching forth of the arms, &c., and we needed not strain compliments to persuade him to be covered, for he still put off and on as he saw us do, and all this with so much exactness, and yet with such a natural and unaffected air that we could not so much as suspect that he did it on design. When we held both his hands and caused another to make such motions, he pressed to get free; but when we would have known more particularly how he found himself affected, he could only give us this simple answer, that it vexed his heart and his brain.”
The writer of this letter had hit upon the solution of the idiosyncracy which he describes, but had not perceived it. The man had been a dotterel.
“Have we not heard,” said the Doctor, “of persons who have ruminated? Do we not read well authenticated cases of some whose skins were tuberculated? Is it not recorded of Dioscorides, not the botanist but the Alexandrian physician of Cleopatra's time, that he was called Phacas because his body was covered with warts? And where was this so likely to have happened as in Egypt? He had been a crocodile. The cases are more frequent of people who in the scaliness of their skins have borne testimony of their piscine origin.”
Was not Margaret Griffith, wife of David Owen of Llan Gaduain in Montgomeryshire shown in London, because a crooked horn four inches long grew out of the middle of her forehead? “A miraculous and monstrous, but yet most true and certain account” of her, with her rude portrait affixed, was imprinted at London by Thomas Owen, in the year of the Spanish Armada, and sold by Edward White, at the little north door of St. Pauls Church at the Sign of the Gun. And in the British Museum there is not only the picture of another horned woman, Davies by name, who was born at Shotwick in Cheshire, but one of the horns also which she shed.
There was a Mistress Bomby, (not the Mother Bombie of the old play, but a person of our own times,) who having been a schoolmistress till the age of fifty, married at that age, and on the day of her marriage became deranged. She never recovered her reason, but she lived to be fourscore; and in the latter year of her life a crooked horn sprouted from the side of her forehead, and grew to the length of nearly six inches. Another made its appearance, but its growth was stopped. It is to be regretted that the person who recorded this did not say whether the second horn made its appearance on the other side of the forehead, so as to correspond with the former and form a pair.
Blumenbach had three human horns in his collection, all the growth of one woman. She had broken her head by a fall and the first of them grew from the wound; it continued growing for thirty years, till it was about ten inches long, then it dropped off; a second grew from its place, this was short thick and nearly straight, and she shed it in less time; the third was growing when she died, and the Professor had it cut from the corpse. The first was completely twisted like a ram's horn, was round and rough, of a brownish colour, and full half an inch in diameter at the roots. All three appeared to be hollow and were blunt and rounded at the termination. It has been said that all the cases of this kind which have been observed have been in women; the remark whether it were made by Blumenbach, or by the intelligent traveller who describes this part of his collection, would if it were true be unimportant, because of the paucity of cases that have been recorded: but there is a case of a male subject, and it is remarkable for the circumstances attending it.
Marshal Laverdin in the year 1599 was hunting in the province of Maine, when his attendants came in sight of a peasant who, instead of waiting to pay his obeisance to their master, fled from them. They pursued and overtook him; and as he did not uncover to salute the Marshal, they plucked off his cap, and discovered that he had a horn growing on his head. François Trouillu was this poor man's name, and he was then aged thirty-four years: the horn began to sprout when he was about seven years old; it was shaped almost like that of a ram, only the flutings were straight instead of spiral, and the end bowed inwards toward the cranium. The fore part of his head was bald, and his beard red and tufted, such as painters bestow upon Satyrs. He had retired to the woods hoping to escape exposure there, and there he wrought in the coal-pits. Marshal Laverdin took possession of him as he would of a wild beast, and sent him as a present to Henry IV; and that King, with even more inhumanity than the Marshal, bestowed him upon somebody who carried him about as a show. Mezeray, who relates this without any comment upon the abominable tyranny of the Marshal and the King, concludes the story by saying “the poor man took it so much to heart to be thus led about like a bear and exposed to the laughter and mockery of his fellow creatures, that he very soon died.”
Blumenbach says “it has been ascertained by chemical analysis that such horns have a greater affinity in their composition with the horns of the rhinoceros than of any other animal.” It may be so; but the short and straight horns were stunted in their growth; their natural tendency was to twist like a sheep's horn;—and the habit of cornification is more likely to have been formed nearer home than in the interior of Africa.
The first rope-dancer, or as Johnson would have called him ‘funambulist,’ the Doctor said, had been a monkey; the first fellow who threw a somerset, a tumbler pigeon.
The Oneirocrites, or Oneirologists, as they who pretended to lay down rules for the interpretation of dreams called themselves, say that if any one dreams he has the head of a horse on his shoulders instead of his own, it betokens poverty and servitude. The Doctor was of opinion that it presaged nothing, but that it bore a retrospective interpretation, being the confused reminiscence of a prior state.
Amateur thieves,—for there are persons who commit petty larcenies with no other motive than the pleasure of stealing,—he supposed to have been tame magpies or jackdaws. And in the vulgar appellation which is sometimes bestowed upon an odious woman, he thought that though there was not more meant than meets the ear, there was more truth conveyed than was intended.
A dramatist of Charles the First's reign, says,
'Tis thought the hairy child that's shown about
Came by the mother's thinking on the picture
Of Saint John Baptist, in his camel's coat.
But for this and other recorded cases of the same kind the Doctor accounted more satisfactorily to himself by his own theory. For though imagination, he said, might explain these perfectly well, (which he fully admitted,) yet it could not explain the horned, nor the tubercular, nor the ruminating cases; nor the case of John Ferguisson, of the parish of Killmelfoord in Argyleshire, who lived eighteen years without taking any other sustenance than water, and must therefore either have been a leech, tortoise, or some other creature capable of being so supported. Nor could any thing so well as his hypothesis explain the cases in which various parts of the human body had been covered with incrustations, which were shed and reproduced in continual succession, a habit retained from some crustaceous stage of existence, and probably acquired in the form of a crab or lobster. Still more remarkable was the case of a German, communicated by Dr. Steyerthall to the Royal Society: this poor man cast his leg by an effort of nature, not by an immediate act of volition as he would have done in his crab or lobster state, for the power had not been retained with the habit, but after long and severe suffering; the limb however at last separated of itself, and the wound healed.
Neither, he said, could imagination explain the marvellous and yet well-attested story of the Danish woman who lay in, like Leda, of two eggs. The neighbours who were called in at the delivery, most improperly broke one and found that it contained a yolk and white, to all appearance as in that of a hen, which it also resembled in size. The other, instead of endeavouring to hatch it, they sent to Olaus Wormius, and it is still to be seen at Copenhagen.
How, he would ask, was the case of Samuel Chilton, near Bath, to be explained, who used to sleep for weeks and months at a time; but as an old habit of hibernation, acting at irregular times, because it was no longer under the direction of a sane instinct. And how that of the idiot at Ostend, who died at last in consequence of his appetite for iron, no fewer than eight and twenty pieces to the amount of nearly three pounds in weight, having been found in his stomach after death. Who but must acknowledge that he had retained this habit from an ostrich?
This poor creature was really ferrivorous. The Doctor though he sometimes pressed into his service a case to which some exceptions might have been taken, would not have classed as a quondam ostrich, the sailor who used to swallow knives for a feat of desperate bravery, and died miserably as might be expected. Nor would he have formed any such conclusion concerning the person of whom Adam Clarke has preserved the following remarkable story, in the words of Dr. Fox who kept a lunatic asylum near Bristol.
“In my visits among my patients, one morning, I went into a room where two, who were acquaintances of each other, were accustomed to live: immediately I entered, I noticed an unusual degree of dejection about one of them, and a feverish kind of excitement in the other. I enquired what was the matter? ‘Matter!’ said the excited one, ‘matter enough! he has done for himself!’—‘Why? what has he done?’—‘Oh he has only swallowed the poker!’ During this short conversation the other looked increasingly mournful; and on my enquiring what was the matter with him, he replied, ‘He has told you true enough; I have swallowed the poker, and do not know what I shall do with it!’ ‘I will tell you how it happened,’ said the first. ‘My friend and I were sitting by the fire talking on different things, when I offered to lay him a wager that he could not eat any of the poker: he said he could and would; took it up, twisted the end of it backward and forward between the bars of the grate, and at last broke off some inches of it, and instantly swallowed it; and he has looked melancholy ever since.’ I did not believe,” said Dr. Fox, “a word of this tale; and I suppose the narrator guessed as much, for he added, ‘O, you can see that it is true, for there is the rest of the poker.’ I went to the grate and examined the poker, which, being an old one, had been much burned; and where the action of the fire had been fiercest and had worn away the iron, a piece of between two and three inches had been wrenched off and was missing. Still I could hardly credit that the human stomach could receive such a dose and remain ‘feeling,’ as the professed swallower of it said, ‘nothing particular.’ However the constant affirming of the first, united to the assent and rueful looks of the second, induced me to use the patient as though the account were true: I administered very strong medicines, and watched their effects constantly. The man eat and drank and slept as usual, and appeared to suffer nothing but from the effect of the medicines. At last, to my astonishment, the piece of the poker came away, and the man was as well as ever. The iron had undergone a regular process of digestion and the surface of it was deeply honey-combed by the action of the juices. This was a most singular case, and proves how the God of Nature has endowed our system with powers of sustaining and redressing the effects of our own follies.”
The tales of lycanthropy which are found in such different ages and remote countries, strongly supported the Doctor's theory. Virgil, and Ovid in his story of Lycaon, had only adapted a popular superstition to their purposes. And like its relator he regarded as a mere fable the legend which Pliny has preserved from the lost works of Evanthes a Greek author not to be despised. Evanthes had found it written among the Arcadians that a man from the family of a certain author in that country was chosen by lot and taken to a certain lake; there he stript, hung his garments upon an oak, swam across and going into the wilderness, became a wolf, and herded with wolves for nine years; and if during that time he abstained from doing any hurt to men, he returned to the lake, recrossed it, resumed his human form, with the only change of being the worse, not for the wear indeed, but for the lapse of those nine years; and moreover found his clothes where he had left them. Upon which Pliny observes, Mirum est quo procedat Græca credulitas! Nullum tam impudens mendacium est quod teste careat.
A worse manner of effecting the same metamorphosis Pliny relates from the Olympionics of Agriopas; that at a human sacrifice offered by the Arcadians to Jupiter Lycæus, one Demænetus Parrhasius tasted the entrails, and was transformed into a wolf; at the expiration of ten years he resumed his original form, and obtained the prize of pugilism at the Olympic games.
But the Doctor differed from Pliny's opinion that all which is related concerning lycanthropy must be rejected or all believed;—Homines in lupos verti rursumque restitui sibi, falsum esse confidenter existimare debemus; aut credere omnia, quæ fabulosa tot seculis comperimus. The belief however, he admits, was so firmly fixed in the common people that their word for turncoat was derived from it;—Unde tamen ista vulgo infixa sit fama in tantum, ut in maledictis versipelles habeat, indicabitur. These fables the Doctor argued, could not invalidate the testimony of ancient physicians, that there was an actual and well known species of madness, in which men howled like wolves, and wandered by night about in lonely places or among the tombs. It was most severe at the commencement of spring; and was sometimes epidemic in certain countries. Pieter Forest whose character for accuracy and sagacity stands high among medical writers, affirms that he, in the sixteenth century, had seen the disease, and that it was as it had been described by the ancients. He must have been a credulous person who believed Constantinople had been so infested by these wolf-men, that the Grand Seignior and his guards had been obliged to go out against them; killing a hundred and fifty, and putting the rest of the pack to flight. This was a traveller's tale; and the stories related in books of demonology and witchcraft, concerning wretches who had been tried and executed for having, in the shape of wolves, killed and eaten children, and who had confessed their guilt, might be explained, like other confessions of witchcraft, by the effects of fear and tortures; yet there were cases upon which the Doctor thought no doubt could be entertained.
One case upon which the Doctor insisted, was that of an Italian peasant near Pavia, who in the year 1541, was seized with this madness, and fancying himself to be a wolf, attacked several persons in the fields and killed some of them. He was taken at last, but not without great difficulty; and when in the hands of his captors he declared that he was a wolf, however much they might doubt the avowal, and that the only difference between him and other wolves was, that they had their fur on the outside of the skin, but his was between the skin and the flesh. The madman asserted this so positively that some of the party, trop inhumains et loups par effect, as Simon Goulart says with a humanity above the standard of his age, determined to see, and made several slashes in his arms and legs. Repenting of their cruelty, when they had convinced themselves by this experiment that the poor wretch was really insane, they put him under the care of a surgeon; and he died in the course of a few days under his hands. “Now” said the Doctor “if this were a solitary case, it would evidently be a case of madness; but as lycanthropy is recognized by physicians of different times and countries, as a specific and well known affection of the human mind, can it be so satisfactorily explained in any other manner, as by the theory of progressive existence,—by the resurrection of a habit belonging to the preceding stage of the individual's progress?”
The superstition was not disbelieved by Bishop Hall. In the account of what he observed in the Netherlands, he says of Spa, “the wide deserts on which it borders are haunted with three kinds of ill cattle, free booters, wolves, and witches, though these two last are often one.”
When Spenser tells us it was said of the Irish, as of the Scythians, how they were once a year turned into wolves, “though Master Camden in a better sense doth suppose it was the disease called Lycanthropia,”—he adds these remarkable words, “yet some of the Irish do use to make the wolf their gossip.” Now it must be observed that gossip is not here used in its secondary meaning of a talking, tattling, or tippling companion, but in its original import, though wickedly detorted here: “Our Christian ancestors,” says Verstegan, “understanding a spiritual affinity to grow between the parents and such as undertook for the child at baptism, called each other by the name of God-sib, which is as much as to say as that they were sib together, that is, of kin together, through God.” The Limerick schoolmaster whose words are transcribed by Camden, says, “they receive wolves as gossips, calling them Chari-Christ, praying for them, and wishing them happy; upon which account they are not afraid of them.” There was great store of wolves in Ireland at that time; and the Doctor asked whether so strange a custom could be satisfactorily explained in any way but by a blind consciousness of physical affinity,—by supposing that those who chose wolves to be godfathers and godmothers for their children, had in the preceding stage of their own existence been wolves themselves?
How triumphantly would he have appealed to a story which Captain Beaver relates in his African Memoranda. “In the evening” says that most enterprising, resolute, able, and right minded man, “two or three of the grumetas came to me and said that Francisco, one of their party, was not a good man: that he wanted to eat one of them, John Basse, who had been this day taken very ill. As I could not comprehend what they meant by saying that one of them wanted to eat another, I sent for Johnson to explain. He said that the man accused of eating the other was a witch, and that he was the cause of John Basse's illness, by sucking his blood with his infernal witchcraft; and that these people had come to request that I would let them tie him to a tree and flog him, after they had finished their work. I told them that there was no such thing as a witch; that it was impossible for this man to suck the blood of another, by any art which he could possibly possess; that he could not be the cause of another man's illness by such means; and that with respect to flogging, no one punished on the island but myself. Johnson who is as bigotted in this instance as any of them, says that he is well known to be a witch; that he has killed many people with his infernal art, and that this is the cause of his leaving his own country, where if he should ever be caught, he would be sold as a slave; and that he with difficulty had prevented the other grumetas from throwing him overboard on their passage from Bissao hither. Johnson moreover told me that there was another witch among the grumetas, who had the power of changing himself into an alligator, and that he also had killed many people by his witchcraft, and was consequently obliged to run from his country. They therefore most earnestly entreated me to let them punish them, country-fashion, and they promised not to kill either of them. Astonished at the assurance that neither of them should be killed if they were permitted to punish them, I told Johnson that if such a thing should occur, I would immediately hang all those concerned in it, and then endeavoured to reason them out of their foolish notions respecting these two poor men. Johnson replied, that it was the custom of the country for white men never to interfere in these cases, and that at Bissao the governor never took notice of their thus punishing one another according to their own country fashion, and that they expected the same indulgence here; for that if these people were in their own country, they would either be killed or sold, as witchcraft was never forgiven and its professors never suffered to remain in their own country when once found out. I had now all the grumetas round me, among whom were the accused themselves, and endeavoured again to convince them of the innocence of these people, by pointing out the impossibility of their hurting others by any magic or spell, or of transforming themselves into any other shape. When many of them said this man had often avowed his turning himself into an alligator to devour people: ‘How say you Corasmo, said I, did you ever say so to any of these people?’ ‘Yes,’ was his reply. ‘What do you mean? do you mean to say that you ever transformed yourself into any other shape than that which you now bear?’ ‘Yes,’ was the answer. ‘Now, Corasmo, you know that white man knows every thing; you cannot deceive me; therefore avow to those people, that you never changed yourself into an alligator, and that these are all lies.’ ‘No,’ was his reply,—who can believe it? ‘I can change myself into an alligator, and have often done it.’ This was such an incorrigible witch that I immediately gave him up to the grumetas to punish him, but desired them to be merciful.—It is scarcely credible that a man can so work upon his own weak imagination as to believe, which I doubt not this man did, its own fanciful creations to be realities.—After the grumetas had left me last night I regretted having delivered up to them the two poor miserable wretches accused of witchcraft. From ten till twelve at night their cries were most piteous and loud, and though distant a full half mile, were distinctly heard. This morning they cannot move.”
There was a Mr. William Wright of Saham Tony in Norfolk who used to cast his skin every year, sometimes once, sometimes twice; it was an uneasy and distressing effort of nature, preceded by itching, red spots and swellings; the fingers became stiff, hard, and painful at the ends, and about the nails the pain was exquisite. The whole process of changing was completed in from ten to twelve days, but it was about six months before the nails were perfectly renewed. From the hands the skin came off whole like a glove: and a print representing one of these gloves is given with the account of the case in the Gentleman's Magazine.
When this was related to the Doctor it perplexed him. The habit was evidently that of a snake; and it did not agree with his theory to suppose that the Archeus would pass, as it were per saltum, from so low a stage of existence to the human form. But upon reading the account himself he was completely satisfied as soon as he found that the subject was an Attorney.
He did not know, because it was not known till Mr. Wilkin published his excellent edition of Sir Thomas Browne's Works, that that Philosopher sent to his son Dr. Edward Browne “the skin of the palm of a woman's hand, cast off at the end of a fever, or in the declination thereof. I called it,” he says, “exuvium palmæ muliebris, the Latin word being exuvia in the plural, but I named it exuvium, or exuvia in the singular number. It is neat, and worthy to be shown when you speak of the skin. Snakes and lizards and divers insects cast their skins, and they are very neat ones: men also in some diseases, by pieces, but I have not met with any so neat as this: a palmister might read a lecture of it. The whole soles of the feet came off, and I have one.” If the Doctor had heard of this case, and had not suspected the woman of having once belonged to a generation of vipers, or some snekki-famili as the words are rendered in the Talkee-talkee version, he would have derived her from an eel, and expressed a charitable hope that she might not still be a slippery subject.
