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in his Traité sur les Apparitions des Esprits, et sur les Vampires, and in his preface he tells us the reasons which induced him to undertake this examination. One point which he emphasizes must carefully be borne in mind and merits detailed consideration. Vampires, as we have seen, particularly infest Slavonic countries, and it does not appear that this species of apparition was well known in western Europe until towards the end of the seventeenth century. There undoubtedly were cases of vampirism, as will be recorded in their due order, and certain aspects of witchcraft have much in common with the vampire tradition, especially the exercise of that malign power whereby the witch caused her enemies to dwindle, peak and pine, draining them dry as hay. But this is not vampirism proper. The fuller knowledge of these horrors reached western Europe in detail during the eighteenth century, and it at once threw very considerable light upon unrelated cases that had been recorded from time to time, but which appeared isolated and belonging to no particular category. Writing in 1746, Dom Calmet, who had long studied the subject, remarks that certain events, certain movements, certain fanaticisms, certain phenomena, it may be in the physical or in the supernatural order, distinguish and characterise certain several centuries. He continues: “In this present age and for about sixty years past, we have been the hearers and the witnesses of a new series of extraordinary incidents and occurrences. Hungary, Moravia, Silesia, Poland, are the principal theatre of these happenings. For here we are told that dead men, men who have been dead for several months, I say, return from the tomb, are heard to speak, walk about, infest hamlets and villages, injure both men and animals, whose blood they drain thereby making them sick and ill, and at length actually causing death. Nor can men deliver themselves from these terrible visitations, nor secure themselves from these horrid attacks, unless they dig the corpses up from the graves, drive a sharp stake through these bodies, cut off the heads, tear out the hearts; or else they burn the bodies to ashes. The name given to these ghosts is Oupires, or Vampires, that is to say, blood-suckers, and the particulars which are related of them are so singular, so detailed, accompanied with circumstances so probable and so likely, as well as with the most weighty and well-attested legal deposition