University, and succeeded to his father’s charge, converting the lairds and others ‘to the true Protestant faith’ (1680).  At the Revolution, or later, being an Episcopalian and Jacobite, he was deprived of his stipend, but was not superseded and continued the exercise of his ministry till his death in 1702.  Being in Edinburgh in 1700, he met Andrew Symson, a relation of his wife:  they fell into discourse on the second sight, and he sent his little manuscript to Symson who published it in 1707.  There is an Edinburgh reprint, by Webster, in 1820.  The work is dedicated to Lord Cromartie, the Lord Tarbatt of Kirk’s book, and the correspondent of Pepys.  Symson adds a preface, apologising for Mr. Frazer’s lack of books and learned society, and giving an example of transference of second sight:  the seer placed his foot on that of the person interested, who then saw a ship labouring in a storm.  The tale was not at first hand.

Mr. Frazer, in his tractate, first deals with the question of fact, of the hallucinations called second sight:  ’That such representations are made to the eyes of men and women, is to me out of all doubt, and that affects follow answerable thereto, as little questionable’.  But many doubt as to the question of fact, ‘wherefore so little has been written about it’.  Four or five instances, he thinks, will suffice, 1.  A servant of his left a barn where he slept, ’because nightly he had seen a dead corps in his winding sheet, straighted beside him’.  In about half a year a young man died and was buried in the barn. 2.  Mr. Frazer went to stay in Mull with Sir William Sacheverell, who wrote on second sight in the Isle of Man, and was then engaged in trying to recover treasures from the vessel of the Armada sunk in Tobermory Bay.  The Duke of Argyll has a cannon taken from Francis I. at Pavia, which was raised from this vessel, and, lately, the fluke of a ship’s anchor brought up a doubloon.  But the treasure still lies in Tobermory Bay.  Mr. Frazer’s tale merely is that a woman told a sailor to bid him leave a certain boy behind.  The sailor did not give the message, the boy died, and the woman said that she had seen the lad ’walking with me in his winding sheets, sewed up from top to toe,’ that this portent never deceived her. 3.  A funeral was seen by Duncan Campbell, in Kintyre, he soon found himself at the real funeral.

4.  John Macdonald saw a sea-captain all wet, who was drowned, ‘about a year thereafter’.  The seer ’was none of the strictest life’. 5.  A man in Eigg foretold an invasion and calamities.  The vision was fulfilled by a landing of English forces in 1689, when Mr. Frazer himself was a prisoner of Captain Pottinger’s, in Eigg.  He next mentions an old woman who, in a syncope or catalepsy, believed she had been in heaven.  She had a charm of barbarous words, whereby she could see the answers to questions ’in live images before her eyes, or upon the wall, but the images were not tractable (tangible), which she found by putting to her hand, but could find nothing’.  In place of burning this poor crone, Mr. Frazer reasoned with her, ’taught her the danger and vanity of her practice,’ and saw her die peacefully in extreme old age.