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.