long time tormented an honest fellow under the usual form of cats, till one night he put them to flight with his broadsword, and cut off the leg of one less nimble than the rest; taking it up, to his amazement he found it to be a woman's leg, and next morning he discovered the old hag its owner with but one leg left. In France the creature has what is historically the same name as our 'werewolf;' viz. in early forms 'gerulphus,' 'garoul,' and now pleonastically 'loup-garou.' The parliament of Franche-Comté made a law in 1573 to expel the werewolves; in 1598 the werewolf of Angers gave evidence of his hands and feet turning to wolf's claws; in 1603, in the case of Jean Grenier, the judge declared lycanthropy to be an insane delusion, not a crime. In 1658, a French satirical description of a magician could still give the following perfect account of the witch-werewolf: 'I teach the witches to take the form of wolves and eat children, and when anyone has cut off one of their legs (which proves to be a man's arm) I forsake them when they are discovered, and leave them in the power of justice.' Even in our own day the idea has by no means died out of the French peasant's mind. Not ten years ago in France, Mr. Baring-Gould found it impossible to get a guide after dark across a wild place haunted by a loup-garou, an incident which led him afterwards to write his 'Book of Werewolves,' a monograph of this remarkable combination of myth and madness.[1]
If we judged the myths of early ages by the unaided power of our modern fancy, we might be left unable to account for their immense effect on the life and belief of mankind. But by the study of such evidence as this, it
- ↑ For collections of European evidence, see W. Hertz, 'Der Werwolf;' Baring-Gould, 'Book of Werewolves;' Grimm, 'D. M.' p. 1047; Dasent, 'Norse Tales,' Introd. p. cxix.; Bastian, 'Mensch.' vol. ii. pp. 32, 566; Brand, 'Pop. Ant.' vol. i. p. 312, vol. iii. p. 32; Lecky, 'Hist. of Rationalism,' vol. i. p. 82. Particular details in Petron. Arbiter, Satir. lxii.; Virgil. Eclog. viii. 97; Plin. viii. 34; Herodot. iv. 105; Mela ii. 1; Augustin. De Civ. Dei, xviii. 17; Hanusch, 'Slav. Myth.' pp 286, 320; Wuttke, 'Deutsche Volksaberglaube,' p. 118.
