Brief notice of several authors to whom the present age is indebted for knowledge of most of the facts and beliefs which will be presented in the following pages, may be appropriate here. Their competency, traits, and circumstances, as inferred chiefly from their writings pertaining to witchcraft, are all, or nearly all, which we propose to state.

Two of these who lived in witchcraft times, a third in an intervening century, and a fourth in our own age, viz., Cotton Mather, Robert Calef, Thomas Hutchinson, and Charles W. Upham, will severally be noticed, because their works have been specially instructive and suggestive, and have had very much influence in shaping public opinions and conclusions in reference to the mysterious matters under consideration. Each of the above-named authors either lacked, or failed to use, some light which is now available for disclosing contents in vailed recesses of nature—light beginning to shine in where darkness long brooded, and to elicit thence such knowledge as promises to show that the theories of most witchcraft expounders have been such as now may be, and should be, superseded by more broad, sound, and philosophical ones.The writings of the first two named above are eminently important, because they disclose very distinctly many highly operative beliefs and methods which were prevalent when marked witchcraft phenomena were actually transpiring, but are obsolete now. We cannot, perhaps, do better than forthwith present those two combatants, Mather and Calef, in actual conflict over the last described case of seventeenth century obsession. Out of this case came open conflict, in the very days when such marvels were living occurrences. Further on we may notice these two men, as men, more particularly. Here we take them as contestants about phenomena attendant upon Margaret Rule in 1693; hers, the last of our cases to occur, will come first under our inspection. Our quotations will be mostly from the earlier pages of “Salem Witchcraft,” edited by S. P. Fowler.