without further notice, and turn to a malady most extraordinary in
all its phenomena, having a close connection with the St. Vitus's
dance, and, by a comparison of facts which are altogether similar,
affording us an instructive subject for contemplation. We allude
to the disease called Tarantism, which made its first appearance
in Apulia, and thence spread over the other provinces of Italy,
where, during some centuries, it prevailed as a great epidemic.
In the present times, it has vanished, or at least has lost
altogether its original importance, like the St. Vitus's dance,
lycanthropy, and witchcraft.


SECT. 2--MOST ANCIENT TRACES--CAUSES


The learned Nicholas Perotti gives the earliest account of this
strange disorder. Nobody had the least doubt that it was caused
by the bite of the tarantula, a ground-spider common in Apulia:
and the fear of this insect was so general that its bite was in
all probability much oftener imagined, or the sting of some other
kind of insect mistaken for it, than actually received. The word
tarantula is apparently the same as terrantola, a name given by
the Italians to the stellio of the old Romans, which was a kind of
lizard, said to be poisonous, and invested by credulity with such
extraordinary qualities, that, like the serpent of the Mosaic
account of the Creation, it personified, in the imaginations of
the vulgar, the notion of cunning, so that even the jurists
designated a cunning fraud by the appellation of a "stellionatus."
Perotti expressly assures us that this reptile was called by the
Romans tarantula; and since he himself, who was one of the most