werewolf superstition is undeniable; but modern science finds
in them nothing that cannot be readily explained. That
stupendous process of breeding, which we call civilization,
has been for long ages strengthening those kindly social
feelings by the possession of which we are chiefly
distinguished from the brutes, leaving our primitive bestial
impulses to die for want of exercise, or checking in every
possible way their further expansion by legislative
enactments. But this process, which is transforming us from
savages into civilized men, is a very slow one; and now and
then there occur cases of what physiologists call atavism, or
reversion to an ancestral type of character. Now and then
persons are born, in civilized countries, whose intellectual
powers are on a level with those of the most degraded
Australian savage, and these we call idiots. And now and then
persons are born possessed of the bestial appetites and
cravings of primitive man, his fiendish cruelty and his liking
for human flesh. Modern physiology knows how to classify and
explain these abnormal cases, but to the unscientific
mediaeval mind they were explicable only on the hypothesis of
a diabolical metamorphosis. And there is nothing strange in
the fact that, in an age when the prevailing habits of thought
rendered the transformation of men into beasts an easily
admissible notion, these monsters of cruelty and depraved
appetite should have been regarded as capable of taking on
bestial forms. Nor is it strange that the hallucination under
which these unfortunate wretches laboured should have taken
such a shape as to account to their feeble intelligence for
the existence of the appetites which they were conscious of
not sharing with their neighbours and contemporaries. If a