from “De Schartz [rather Charles Ferdinand de Schertz], in his Magia Postuma, published at Olmutz in 1706.” On p. 166 this story, as given by “E. P. Evans, in his interesting work on the Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals,” is told of “a herdsman near the town of Cadan,” and dated 1337. Pages 60-62 are occupied with an Oriental legend related by “Fornari, in his History of Sorcerers,” by which is presumably intended the Histoire curieuse et pittoresque des sorciers … Revue et augmentée par Fornari, Paris, 1846, and other editions, a book usually catalogued under Giraldo, as by Caillet and Yve-Plessis, although the latter certainly has a cross-reference to Fornari. In greater detail Mr. Dudley Wright narrates this legend which he has already told (pp. 60-62), on pp. 131-137. Such repetition seems superfluous. In the Bibliography we have such entries as “Leo Allatius,” “Encyclopaedia Britannica”; “Frazer’s Golden Bough,” “Nider’s Formicarius,” “Phlegon’s Fragments,” “William of Newbury,” all of which are not merely unscholarly and slovenly, but entirely useless from the point of view of reference. I also remark blunders such as “Philip Rehrius,” “Nicolas Ramy’s Demonolatrie,” “Rymer’s Varney the Vampire.” Who Rymer might be I cannot tell. Varney the Vampire was written by Thomas Preskett Prest.
It may, I think, not unfairly be claimed that the present work is the first serious study in English of the Vampire, and kindred traditions from a general, as well as from a theological and philosophical point of view. I have already pointed out that it were impossible to better such a chapter as Mr. J. C. Lawson has given us in his Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion, a book to which as also to Bernhard Schmidt’s Das Volksleben der Neugriechen und das Hellenische Alterthum, I am greatly indebted. But any wider survey of the vampire tradition will soon be found to demand an examination of legend, customs, and history which extend far beyond Greece, although in such an inquiry the beliefs and practice of modern Greece must necessarily assume a prominent and most material significance.
In the present work I have endeavoured to set forth what might be termed “the philosophy of vampirism,” and however ghastly and macabre they may appear I have felt that here one must not tamely shrink from a careful and detailed consideration
