A writer, in a recent number of the “North-American Review,” on the superstitions of the American Indians, makes the following statement:—­

“The sorcerer, by charms, magic songs, magic feats, and the beating of his drum, had power over the spirits, and those occult influences inherent in animals and inanimate things.  He could call to him the souls of his enemies.  They appeared before him in the form of stones.  He chopped and bruised them with his hatchet; blood and flesh issued forth; and the intended victim, however distant, languished and died.  Like the sorcerer of the middle ages, he made images of those he wished to destroy, and, muttering incantations, punctured them with an awl; whereupon the persons represented sickened and pined away.”

It was a received opinion, accredited and acted upon in courts, that a person in confederacy with the Evil One could not weep.  Those accused of this crime, both in Europe and America, were, in many instances, of an age and condition which rendered it impossible for them, however innocent, to escape the effect of this test.  A decrepit, emaciated person, shrivelled and desiccated by age, was placed at the bar:  and if she could not weep on the spot; if, in consequence of her withered frame, her amazement and indignation at the false and malignant charges by which she was circumvented, her exhausted sensibility, her sullen despair, the hopeless horror of her situation, or, from what often was found to be the effect of the treatment such persons received, a high-toned consciousness of innocence, and a brave defiance and stern condemnation of her maligners and persecutors; if, from any cause, the fountain of tears was closed or dried up,—­their failure to come forth at the bidding of her defamers was regarded as a sure and irrefragable proof of her guilt.

King James explains the circumstance, that witches could not weep, in rather a curious manner:—­

“For as, in a secret murther, if the dead carkasse bee at any time thereafter handled by the murtherer it will gush out of bloud, as if the bloud were crying to the heaven for revenge of the murtherer, God having appointed that secret supernaturall signe for triall of that secret unnaturall crime; so it appeares that God hath appointed (for a supernaturall signe of the monstrous impietie of witches), that the water shall refuse to receive them in her bosome that have shaken off them the sacred water of baptisme, and wilfully refused the benefite thereof:  no, not so much as their eyes are able to shed teares (threaten and torture them as ye please), while first they repent (God not permitting them to dissemble their obstinacie in so horrible a crime), albeit the woman kind especially be able otherwise to shed teares at every light occasion when they will,—­yea, although it were dissemblingly like the crocodiles.”

Reginald Scott, in introducing a Romish form of adjuration, makes the following excellent remarks on the trial by tears:—­