South Sea island, the impulse and its outcome have been ever the same. Compared with the potent share of magic in human history, its literature is indeed but scant. Its choicest secrets have always gone by word of mouth. Yet it is a literature of all times and lands. From the clay volumes of Assyrian kings and the papyrus rolls of Egypt to the latest utterance of the spirits through Mr. Slade or of the mystic sages of the Orient through Mr. Sinnett, it is as perennial as human folly itself. Its faith may be feigned, its miracles sham; but magic itself is actual and universal. But witchcraft never was. It was but a shadow, a nightmare: the nightmare of a religion, the shadow of a dogma. Less than five centuries saw its birth, its vigor, its decay. And this birth, this vigor, this decay, were--to a degree perhaps else unknown in history--caused by and mirrored in a literature. Of that literature it has during the last decade been mine, as librarian of the President White Library at Cornell University, to aid in building up a collection. In the last few months I have had in hand the making ready of its catalogue for the press. My task is by no means finished, and I have much to learn; but it has seemed to me that even such a hurried survey of the literature of witchcraft as I may presume to attempt may not be without interest to the American Historical Association. And this the more, since no adequate bibliography of it has ever yet been published, and no historian has thoroughly known and exploited it. The literature of witchcraft, indeed, if under the name be included all the books which touch upon that dark subject, is something enormous. For at least four centuries no comprehensive work on theology, on philosophy, on history, on law, on medicine, on natural science, could wholly ignore it; and to lighter literature it afforded the most telling illustrations for the pulpit, the most absorbing gossip for the news-letter, the most edifying tales for the fireside. But the works devoted wholly or mainly to witchcraft are much fewer. Roundly and rudely estimated, this monographic literature includes perhaps a thousand or fifteen hundred titles.[1] The earliest of the books on witchcraft were written in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Their writers were Dominicans of the Inquisition. Not that Brother Nicolas Eymeric or Brother Nicolas Jaquier or Brother John Vineti or Brother Jerome Visconti knew that he was writing on a new theme. On the contrary, they wrote to prove that this witchcraft whereof they spoke was as old as mankind. And they cited not only Thomas Aquinas and Vincent of Beauvais, but Isidore and Gregory and Cassian and Augustine, and, above all, the Bible,--nay, even Josephus and the ancient poets, Horace and Virgil and Ovid. Wherein, then, was it really new, and how did they come to write on it at all? Bear with me while I try very briefly to answer. Magic, in truth, the Christian Church had always known. Even the ancient faiths of Greece and Rome had, like all faiths, fought magic sternly; and, like all faiths, had counted magic much that was not so. But their polytheistic tolerance had reckoned it more a crime than a sin, and had not stigmatized as magical other faiths, save when, as in the case of Christianity, their own exclusiveness seemed to stamp their votaries as foes to the rest of mankind. Less indifferent was Christianity itself. Whatever the conceptions of her founder and of his...