Note 53 — GEORGE LYMAN KITTREDGE

Discoverie of Witchcraft, xiii, 22-34, ed. 1584, pp. 321 ff., ed. 1665, pp. 181-201 (with cuts). Most of the tricks which Scot describes are identical with feats of legerdemain that are the stock in trade of every modern juggler:—“To throwe a peece of monie awaie, and to find it againe where you list” (p. 326); “To make a groat or a testor to sinke through a table, and to vanish out of a handkercher very strangelie” (p. 327); “How to deliver out foure aces, and to convert them into foure knaves” (p. 333); “To tell one without confederacie what card he thinketh” (p. 334); “To burne a thred, and to make it whole againe with the ashes thereof” (p. 341); “To cut off ones head, and to laie it in a platter, &c.: which the jugglers call the decollation of John Baptist” (p. 349). The picture of the apparatus required for the last-mentioned trick is very curious indeed (p. 353). The references to Scot, unless the contrary is stated, are to all the pages of the first (1584) edition, as reprinted by Dr. Brinsley Nicholson (London, 1886).