experience.  Sometimes it was necessary to draw down the eyelids with the fingers.  Sickness and swooning occasionally accompanied the hallucination.  The visions were usually symbolical, shrouds, coffins, funerals.  Visitors were seen before their arrival.  ’I have been seen thus myself by seers of both sexes at some 100 miles distance; some that saw me in this manner had never seen me personally, and it happened according to their visions, without any previous design of mine to go to those places, my coming there being purely accidental.’  Children are subject to the vision, the horse of a seer, or the cow a second-sighted woman is milking, receives the infection, at the moment of a vision, sweats and trembles.  Horses are very nervous animals, cows not so much so.

As to objections, the people are very temperate, and madness is unknown, hence they are not usually visionary.  That the learned ’are not able to oblige the world with a satisfying account of those visions,’ is no argument against the fact of their occurrence.  The seers are not malevolent impostors, and there are cases of second-sighted folk of birth and education, ’nor can a reasonable man believe that children, horses, and cows could be pre-engaged in a combination to persuade the world of the reality of the second sight’.  The gift is not confined to the Western Islands, and Martin gives a Dutch example, with others from the Isle of Man.  His instances are of the usual sort, the fulfilment was sometimes long deferred.  He mentions a case, but not that given by Mr. Frazer, in the Isle of Eigg.  The natives had been at Killiecrankie, and one of them murdered an English soldier in Skye, hence the English invasion of 1689, in which a pretty girl (as had been prophesied by a seer) was brutally ill-treated.  The most interesting cases are those in which strangers are seen, and peculiarities in their dress observed before their arrival.  In the Pirate Scott shows how Norna of the Fitful Head managed to utter such predictions by aid of early information; and so, as Cleveland said, ‘prophesied on velvet’.  There are a few cases of a brownie being seen, once by a second-sighted butler, who observed brownie directing a man’s game at chess.  Martin’s book was certainly not calculated to convince Dr. Johnson; his personal evidence only proves that a kind of hallucinatory trance existed, or was feigned.

Later than Martin we have the long work of Theophilus Insulanus, which contains many ‘cases,’ of more or less interest or absurdity.  But Theophilus is of no service to the framer of philosophical or physiological theories of the second sight.  The Presbyterian clergy generally made war on the belief, but one of them, as Mrs. Grant reports in her Essays, {244} had an experience of his own.  This good old pastor’s ‘daidling bit,’ or lounge, was his churchyard.  In an October twilight, he saw two small lights rise from a spot unmarked by any stone or memorial.  These ‘corpse-candles’