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  In 1692, nineteen villagers were put to death in Salem, Massachusetts.  The
reason for conviction was the torment of teenaged girls by supernatural means:
witchcraft.  These teenagers had experienced "pricking" and "pinching"
sensations, and some contorted into strange bodily positions, reaching unusual
postures of extreme rigidity.  The village doctor blamed the abnormal behavior
on the supernatural; he delared, "An evil hand is on them."(1) With those words
began the greatest witchhunt in America's history.

  In 1976, Linnda Caporeal from the University of California at Santa Barbara
explained the actions of the girls as the effects of an illness resulting from
the ingestion of ergot--a fungus with LSD-like properties that resides in rye.
Perhaps this is not the true cause of the strange behavior, but to the
twentieth century world, it is a justification more believable than that of the
village doctor.

  It is a human tendency to jump to conclusions without knowing all of the
facts.	In the case described above, the village doctor probably did not feel
that he was jumping to conclusions because of the abundance of "witches" in
those days.  Even today, with the abundance of knowledge about the way things
work, some hasten to postulate "God's doings" as the answers to all of our
unanswered questions.  Are we on this earth because "God put us here"?  Was it
a chance arrangement of amino acids in a molecular pool which evolved into a
human being?  Or does the answer lie in some different theory that only time
will reveal?  Whether it be in the case of medicine, religion, history, or
anything requiring judgement, even gossip, one must realize that reality is
impossible to pin down.  Although we may be sure that two parallel lines could
never meet, there may be someone named Lobachevski who is sure that they can.

  (1) Alice Dickenson, The Salem Witchcraft Delusion (New York:  Franklin
Watts, Inc., 1974), p.	16.