Lang Andrew
Cock Lane and Common-Sense
A pretty case of revived memory is given by Miss X. She wanted the date of Ptolemy Philadelphus. Later, in the crystal, she saw a conventional old Jew, writing in a book with massive clasps. Using a magnifying glass, she found that he was writing Greek, but the lines faded, and she only saw the Roman numerals LXX. These suggested the seventy Hebrews who wrote the Septuagint, with the date, 277 B.C., which served for Ptolemy Philadelphus. Miss X. later remembered a memoria technica which she had once learned, with the clue, ‘Now Jewish elders indite a Greek copy’. It is obvious that these queer symbolical reawakenings of memory explain much of the (apparently) ‘unknown’ information given by ‘ghosts,’ and in dreams. A lady, who had long been in very bad health, was one evening seized by a violent recrudescence of memory, and for hours poured out the minutest details of the most trivial occurrences; the attack was followed by a cerebral malady from which she fortunately recovered. The same phenomenon of awakened memory has occasionally been reported by people who were with difficulty restored after being seven-eighths drowned.
The crystal ball, in the proper hands, merely illustrates the possibility of artificially reviving memory, while the fanciful visions, akin to illusions hypnagogiques, have, in all ages, been interpreted by superstition as revelations of the distant or the future. Of course, if there is such a thing as occasional transference of thought, so that the idea in the inquirer’s mind is reflected in the crystal-gazer’s vision, the hypothesis of the superstitious will fix on this as a miracle, still more will that hypothesis be strengthened, if future or distant events, not consciously known, are beheld. Such things must occasionally occur, by chance, in the myriad confusions of dreams, and, to the same extent, in crystal visions. Miss X.’s three cases of possible telepathy in her own experience are trivial, and do not seem to rise beyond the possibility of fortuitous coincidence: and her possible clairvoyant visions she leaves to the judgment of the reader, ‘to interpret as clairvoyance, or coincidence, or prevision, or whatever else he will’. The crystal-gazer known to the author once managed to see the person (unknown to her) who was in the mind of the other party in the experiment. But she has made scarcely any experiments of this description.
The inferences to be drawn from crystal-gazing are not unimportant. First, we note that the practice is very ancient and widely diffused, among civilised and uncivilised people. In this diffusion it answers to the other practices, the magical rites of Australian blacks, Greeks, Eskimo; to the stories of ‘death-bed wraiths,’ of rappings, and so forth. Now this uniformity, as far as regards the latter phenomena, may be explained by transmission of ideas, or by the uniformity of human nature, while the phenomena themselves may be mere inventions like other myths. In the case of crystal-gazing, however, we can scarcely push scepticism so far as to deny that the facts exist, that hallucinations are actually provoked. The inference is that a presumption is raised in favour of the actuality of the other phenomena universally reported. They, too, may conceivably be hallucinatory; the rappings and haunting noises may be auditory, as the crystal visions are ocular hallucinations. The sounds so widely attested may not cause vibrations in the air, just as the visions are not really in the crystal ball. As the unconscious self suggests the pictures in the ball, so it may suggest the unexplained noises. But while, as a rule, only one gazer sees the visions, the sounds (usually but not invariably) are heard by all present. On the whole, the one case wherein we find facts, if only facts of hallucination, at the bottom of the belief in a world-wide and world-old practice, rather tends in the direction of belief in the other facts, not less universally alleged. We know too much about mythology to agree with Dr. Johnson, in holding that ‘a belief, which prevails as far as human nature is diffused, could become universal only by its truth,’ that ‘those who never heard of one another would not have agreed in a tale which nothing but experience could make credible’. But, on the other hand, a belief is not necessarily untrue, because it is universally diffused.
In the second place, crystal-gazing shows how a substratum of fact may be so overlaid with mystic mummeries, incantations, fumigations, pentacles: and so overwhelmed in superstitious interpretations, introducing fairies and spirits, that the facts run the risk of being swept away in the litter and dust of nonsense. Science has hardly thought crystal-gazing worthy even of contempt, yet it appears to deserve the notice of psychologists. To persons who can ‘scry,’ and who do not see hideous illusions, or become hypnotised, or superstitious, or incur headaches, scrying is a harmless gateway into Les Paradis Artificiels. ‘And the rest, they may live and learn.’ 142
A very few experiments will show people whether they are scryers, or not. The phenomena, it seems, are usually preceded by a mistiness, or milkiness, of the glass: this clears off, and pictures appear. Even the best scryers often fail to see anything in the crystal which maintains its natural ‘diaphaneity,’ as Dr. Dee says. Thus the conditions under which the scryer can scry, are, as yet, unascertained.
The phenomena of scrying were not unknown to Dr. Gregory, Professor of Chemistry in the University of Edinburgh. Dr. Gregory believed in ‘odylic fluid’ on the evidence of Reichenbach’s experiments, which nobody seems to have repeated successfully under strict tests. Clairvoyance also was part of Dr. Gregory’s faith, and, to be fair, phenomena were exhibited at his house, in the presence of a learned and distinguished witness known to the writer, which could only be accounted for either by thought transference, or by an almost, or quite incredible combination of astuteness, and imposture on the side of Dr. Gregory himself. In presence of the clairvoyants the nobleman of whom we speak thought not of his own house, but of a room in the house of a friend. It possessed a very singular feature which it is needless to describe here, but which was entirely out of the experience of the clairvoyante. She described it, however, expressing astonishment at what she ‘saw’. This, unless Dr. Gregory guessed what was likely to be thought of, and was guilty of collusion, can only be explained by thought transference. In other cases the doctor was convinced that he had evidence of actual clairvoyance, and it is difficult to estimate the amount of evidence which will clear such a belief of the charge of credulity. As to ‘scrying’ the doctor thought it could be done in ‘mesmerised water,’ water bewitched. There is no reason to imagine that ‘mesmerised’ is different from ordinary water. 143 He knew that folklore retained the belief in scrying in crystal balls, and added some superfluous magical incantations. The doctor himself was lucky enough to buy an old magical crystal in which some boys, after long staring, saw persons unknown to themselves, but known to the professor, and also persons known to neither. A little girl, casually picking up a crystal ball, cried, ‘There’s a ship in it, with its cloth all in rags. Now it tumbles down, and a woman is working at it, and holds her head in her hand.’ This is a very fair example of a crystal fancy picture. The child’s mother, not having heard what the child said, saw the same vision (p. 165). But this is a story at third hand. The doctor has a number of cases, and held that crystal possesses an ‘odylic’ quality. But a ball of glass serves just as well as a ball of crystal, and is much less expensive.
Children are naturally visionaries, and, as such, are good subjects for experiment. But it may be a cruel, and is a most injudicious thing, to set children a-scrying. Superstition may be excited, or the half-conscious tendency to deceive may be put in motion.
Socrates and Joan of Arc were visionaries as children. Had Joan’s ears been soundly boxed, as Robert de Baudricourt advised, France might now be an English province. But they were not boxed, happily for mankind. Certainly much that is curious may be learned by any one who, having the confidence of a child, will listen to his, or her, accounts of spontaneous visions. The writer, as a boy, knew a child who used to lie prone on the grass watching fairies at play in the miniature forest of blades and leaves. This child had a favourite familiar whom he described freely, but as his remarks were received with good-humoured scepticism, no harm came to him. He would have made a splendid scryer, still, ‘I speak of him but brotherly,’ his revelations would have been taken with the largest allowances. If scrying, on examination, proves to be of real psychological interest, science will owe another debt to folklore, to the folk who kept alive a practice which common-sense would not deign even to examine.
THE SECOND SIGHT
The Gillie and the fire-raising. Survival of belief in second sight. Belief in ancient Greece and elsewhere. Examples in Lapland. Early evidence as to Scotch second sight. Witches burned for this gift. Examples among the Covenanting Ministers. Early investigations by English authors: Pepys, Aubrey, Boyle, Dicky Steele, De Foe, Martin, Kirk, Frazer, Dr. Johnson. Theory of visions as caused by Fairies. Modern example of Miss H. Theory of Frazer of Tiree (1700). ‘Revived impressions of sense.’ Examples. Agency of Angels. Martin. Modern cases. Bodily condition of the seer. Not epileptic. The second-sighted Minister. The visionary Beadle. Transference of vision by touch. Conclusion.
Some years ago, the author was fishing in a river of Inverness-shire. He drove to the stream, picked up an old gillie named Campbell, and then went on towards the spot where he meant to begin angling. A sheep that lay on the road jumped up suddenly, almost under the horse’s feet, the horse shied, and knocked the dogcart against a wall. On the homeward way we observed a house burning, opposite the place where the horse shied, and found that a farmer had been evicted, and his cottage set on fire. This unhappy person, it seems, was in debt to all his tradesmen, not to his landlord only. The fire-raising, however, was an excessively barbaric method of getting him to leave the parish, and the view justified the indignation of the gillie. The old gillie, much excited, declared that the horse had foreseen this event in the morning, and had, consequently, shied. In a more sceptical spirit the author reminded Campbell of the sheep which started up. ‘That sheep was the devil,’ Campbell explained, nor could this rational belief of his be shaken. The affair led to a conversation on the second sight, and Campbell said, ‘he had it not,’ ‘but his sister (or sister-in-law) had it’.
Campbell was a very agreeable companion, interested in old events, and a sympathiser, as he said, in spite of his name, with the great Montrose. His remarks led the author to infer that, contrary to what some inquirers wrote in the last, and Graham Dalyell in the present century, the belief in the second sight is still quite common in the Highlands. As will be shown later, this inference was correct.
We must not, from this survival only, draw the conclusion that the Highlanders are more superstitious than many educated people south of the Highland line. Second sight is only a Scotch name which covers many cases called telepathy and clairvoyance by psychical students, and casual or morbid hallucinations by other people. In second sight the percipient beholds events occurring at a distance, sees people whom he never saw with the bodily eye, and who afterwards arrive in his neighbourhood; or foresees events approaching but still remote in time. The chief peculiarity of second sight is, that the visions often, though not always, are of a symbolical character. A shroud is observed around the living man who is doomed; boding animals, mostly black dogs, vex the seer; funerals are witnessed before they occur, and ‘corpse-candles’ (some sort of light) are watched flitting above the road whereby a burial procession is to take its way. 144 Though we most frequently hear the term ‘second sight’ applied as a phrase of Scotch superstition, the belief in this kind of ominous illusion is obviously universal. Theoclymenus, in the Odyssey, a prophet by descent, and of the same clan as the soothsayer Melampus, beholds the bodies and faces of the doomed wooers, ‘shrouded in night’. The Pythia at Delphi announced a similar symbolic vision of blood-dripping walls to the Athenians, during the Persian War. Again, symbolic visions, especially of blood-dripping walls, are so common in the Icelandic sagas that the reader need only be referred to the prodigies before the burning of Njal, in the Saga of Burnt Njal. Second sight was as popular a belief among the Vikings as among the Highlanders who retain a large share of their blood. It may be argued by students who believe in the borrowing rather than in the independent evolution of ideas, that the Gaelic second sight is a direct inheritance from the Northmen, who have left so many Scandinavian local names in the isles and along the coasts.
However this may be, the Highland second sight is different, in many points, from the clairvoyance and magic of the Lapps, those famous sorcerers. On this matter the History of Lapland, by Scheffer, Professor of Law in Upsala, is generally cited (Oxford, 1674). ‘When the devil takes a liking to any person in his infancy,’ says Scheffer, ‘he presently seizes on him by a disease, in which he haunts him with several apparitions.’ This answers, in magical education, to Smalls, or Little Go.
Some Lapps advance to a kind of mystic Moderations, and the great sorcerers attain to Final Schools, and are Bachelors in Black Arts. ‘They become so knowing that, without the drum they can see things at the greatest distances; and are so possessed by the devil that they see things even against their will.’ The ‘drum’ is a piece of hollow wood covered with a skin, on which rude pictures are drawn. An index is laid on the skin, the drum is tapped, and omens are taken from the picture on which the index happens to rest. But this practice has nothing to do with clairvoyance. In Scheffer’s account of Lapp seers we recognise the usual hysterical or epileptic lads, who, in various societies become saints, mediums, warlocks, or conjurers. But Scheffer shows that the Lapp experts try, voluntarily, to see sights, whereas, except when wrapped in a bull’s hide of old, or cowering in a boiler at the present day, the Highland second-sighted man lets his visions come to him spontaneously and uninvoked. Scheffer wished to take a magical drum from a Lapp, who confessed with tears, that, drum or no drum, he would still see visions, as he proved by giving Scheffer a minute relation ‘of whatever particulars had happened to me in my journey to Lapland. And he further complained, that he knew not how to make use of his eyes, since things altogether distant were presented to them.’ When a wizard is consulted he dances round till he falls, lies on the ground as if dead, and, finally, rises and declares the result of his clairvoyance. His body is guarded by his friends, and no living thing is allowed to touch it. Tornaeus was told many details of his journey by a Lapp, ‘which, although it was true, Tornaeus dissembled to him, lest he might glory too much in his devilish practices’. Olaus Magnus gives a similar account. The whole performance, except that the seer is not bound, resembles the Eskimo ‘sleep of the shadow,’ more than ordinary Highland second sight. The soul of the seer is understood to be wandering away, released from his body.
The belief in clairvoyance, in the power of seeing what is distant, and foreseeing what is in the future, obviously and undeniably occurs everywhere, in ancient Israel, as in Mexico before the Spanish Conquest, and among the Red Indian tribes as among the Zulus. It is more probable that similar hallucinatory experiences, morbid, or feigned, or natural, have produced the same beliefs everywhere, than that the beliefs were evolved only by ‘Aryans,’ – Greeks or Scandinavians – and by them diffused all over the world, to Zulus, Lapps, Indians of Guiana, Maoris.
One of the earliest references to Scotch second sight is quoted by Graham Dalyell from Higden’s Polychronicon (i. lxiv.). 145 ‘There oft by daye tyme, men of that islonde seen men that bey dede to fore honde, byheded’ (like Argyll, in 1661), ‘or hole, and what dethe they deyde. Alyens setten theyr feet upon feet of the men of that londe, for to see such syghtes as the men of that londe doon.’ This method of communicating the hallucination by touch is described in the later books, such as Kirk’s Secret Commonwealth (1691), and Mr. Napier, in his Folklore, mentions the practice as surviving in the present century. From some records of the Orkneys, Mr. Dalyell produces a trial for witchcraft on Oct. 2, 1616. 146 This case included second sight. The husband of Jonka Dyneis being in a fishing-boat at Walls, six miles from her residence at Aith, and in peril, she was ‘fund and sein standing at hir awin hous wall, in ane trans, that same hour he was in danger; and being trappit, she could not give answer, bot stude as bereft of hir senssis: and quhen she was speirit at quhy she wes so movit, she answerit, “Gif our boit be not tynt, she is in great hazard,” – and wes tryit so to be’.
Elspeth Reoch, in 1616, was tried as a witch for a simple piece of clairvoyance, or of charlatanism, as we may choose to believe. The offence is styled ‘secund sicht’ in the official report. Again, Issobell Sinclair, in 1633, was accused, almost in modern spiritualistic phrase, of ‘bein controlled with the phairie, and that be thame, shoe hath the second sight’. 147 Here, then, we find it officially recorded that the second-sighted person is entranced, and more or less unconscious of the outer world, at the moment of the vision. Something like le petit mal, in epilepsy, seems to be intended, the patient ‘stude as bereft of hir senssis’. 148 Again, we have the official explanation of the second sight, and that is the spiritualistic explanation. The seer has a fairy ‘control’. This mode of accounting for what ‘gentle King Jamie’ calls ‘a sooth dreame, since they see it walking,’ inspires the whole theory of Kirk (1691), but he sees no harm either in ‘the phairie,’ or in the persons whom the fairies control. In Kirk’s own time we shall find another minister, Frazer of Tiree, explaining the visions as ‘revived impressions of sense’ (1705), and rejecting various superstitious hypotheses.
The detestable cruelty of the ministers who urged magistrates to burn second-sighted people, and the discomfort and horror of the hallucinations themselves, combined to make patients try to free themselves from the involuntary experience. As a correspondent of Aubrey’s says, towards the end of the sixteenth century: ‘It is a thing very troublesome to them that have it, and would gladly be rid of it.. they are seen to sweat and tremble, and shreek at the apparition’. 149 ‘They are troubled for having it judging it a sin,’ and they used to apply to the presbytery for public prayers and sermons. Others protested that it was a harmless accident, tried to teach it, and endeavoured to communicate the visions by touch.
As usual among the Presbyterians a minister might have abnormal accomplishments, work miracles of healing, see and converse with the devil, shine in a refulgence of ‘odic’ light, or be second-sighted. But, if a layman encroached on these privileges, he was in danger of the tar-barrel, and was prosecuted. On the day of the battle of Bothwell Brig, Mr. Cameron, minister of Lochend, in remote Kintyre, had a clairvoyant view of the fight. ‘I see them (the Whigs) flying as clearly as I see the wall,’ and, as near as could be calculated, the Covenanters ran at that very moment. 150 How Mr. Cameron came to be thought a saint, while Jonka Dyneis was burned as a sinner, for precisely similar experiences, is a question hard to answer. But Joan of Arc, the saviour of France, was burned for hearing voices, while St. Joseph of Cupertino, in spite of his flights in the air, was canonised. Minister or medium, saint or sorcerer, it was all a question of the point of view. As to Cameron’s and Jonka’s visions of distant contemporary events, they correspond to what is told of Apollonius of Tyana, that, at Ephesus, he saw and applauded the murder of Domitian at Rome; that one Cornelius, in Padua, saw Cæsar triumph at Pharsalia; that a maniac in Gascony beheld Coligny murdered in Paris. 151 In the whole belief there is nothing peculiarly Scotch or Celtic, and Wodrow gives examples among the Dutch.
Second Sight, in the days of James VI. had been a burning matter. After the Restoration, a habit of jesting at everything of the kind came in, on one hand; on the other, a desire to investigate and probe the stories of Scotch clairvoyance. Many fellows of the Royal Society, and learned men, like Robert Boyle, Henry More, Glanvill, Pepys, Aubrey, and others, wrote eagerly to correspondents in the Highlands, while Sacheverell and Waldron discussed the topic as regarded the Isle of Man. Then came special writers on the theme, as Aubrey, Kirk, Frazer, Martin, De Foe (who compiled a catch-penny treatise on Duncan Campbell, a Highland fortune-teller in London), Theophilus Insulanus (who was urged to his task by Sir Richard Steele), Wodrow, a great ghost-hunter: and so we reach Dr. Johnson, who was ‘willing to be convinced,’ but was not under conviction. In answer to queries circulated for Aubrey, he learned that ‘the godly’ have not the faculty, but ‘the virtuous’ may have it. But Wodrow’s saint who saw Bothwell Brig, and another very savoury Christian who saw Dundee slain at Killiecrankie, may surely be counted among ‘the godly’. There was difference of opinion as to the hereditary character of the complaint. A correspondent of Aubrey’s vouches for a second-sighted man who babbled too much ‘about the phairie,’ and ‘was suddenly removed to the farther end of the house, and was there almost strangled’. 152 This implies that spirits or ‘Phairies’ lifted him, as they did to a seer spoken of by Kirk, and do to the tribal medicine-men of the Australians, and of course, to ‘mediums’.
Contemporary with Aubrey was the Rev. Robert Kirk of Aberfoyle, a Celtic scholar who translated the Bible into Gaelic. In 1691 he finished his Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Faunes and Fairies, whereof only a fragment has reached us. It has been maintained that the book was printed in 1691, but no mortal eye has seen a copy. In 1815 Sir Walter Scott printed a hundred copies from a manuscript in the Advocates’ Library in Edinburgh. He did not put his name on the book, but Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, in a note on his own copy, affirms that Sir Walter was the editor. 153 Another edition was edited, for Mr. Nutt, by the present writer, in 1893. In the year following the completion of his book Mr. Kirk died, or, as local tradition avers, was carried away to fairyland.
Mr. Kirk has none of the Presbyterian abhorrence of fairies and fauns, though, like the accusers of the Orkney witches, he believes that ‘phairie control’ inspires the second-sighted men, who see them eat at funerals. The seers were wont to observe doubles of living people, and these doubles are explained as ‘co-walkers’ from the fairy world. This ‘co-walker’ ‘wes also often seen of old to enter a hous, by which the people knew that the person of that liknes wes to visite them within a few days’.
Now this belief is probably founded on actual hallucinatory experience, of which we may give a modern example. In the early spring of 1890, a lady, known to the author, saw the ‘copy, echo, or living picture,’ of a stranger, who intended (unknown to her) to visit her house, but who did not carry out his intention. The author can vouch for her perfect integrity, and freedom both from superstition, and from illusions, except in this case. Miss H. lives in Edinburgh, and takes in young men as boarders. At the time of this event, she had four such inmates. Two, as she believed, were in their study on the second floor; two were in the drawing-room on the first floor, where she herself was sitting. The hour was seven o’clock in the evening, and the lamp on the stair was lit. Miss H. left the drawing-room, and went into a cupboard on the landing, immediately above the lamp. She saw a young gentleman, of fair complexion, in a suit of dark blue, coming down the staircase from the second floor. Supposing him to be a friend of her boarders whose study was on that floor, she came out of the cupboard, closed the door to let him pass, and made him a slight bow. She did not hear him go out, nor did the maid who was standing near the street door. She did not see her two friends of the upstairs study till nine o’clock: they had been at a lecture. When they met, she said: ‘Did you take your friend with you?’
‘What friend?’
‘The fair young man who left your rooms at seven.’
‘We were out before seven, we don’t know whom you mean.’
The mystery of the young man, who could not have entered the house without ringing, was unsolved. Next day a lady living exactly opposite Miss H.’s house, asked that lady if she could give hospitality to a young man who was coming to Edinburgh from the country. Miss H. assented, and prepared a room, but the visitor, she was informed, went to stay with a relation of his own. Two days later Miss H. was looking out of her dining-room window after luncheon.
‘Why, there’s my ghost!’ she exclaimed, and her friends, running to the window, allowed that he answered to the description. The ‘ghost’ went into the house of Miss H.’s friend on the other side of the street, and Miss H., with natural curiosity, sallied out, and asked who he was. He was the young man for whom she had prepared a room. During his absence in the country, his ‘co-walker’ had visited the house at which he intended to stay!
Coincidences of this kind, then, gave rise to the belief in this branch of second sight.
Though fairies are the ‘phantasmogenetic agencies’ in second sight, a man may acquire the art by magic. A hair rope which has bound a corpse to a bier is wound about him, and then he looks backward ‘through his legs’ till he sees a funeral. The vision of a seer can be communicated to any one who puts his left foot under the wizard’s right foot.
This is still practised in some parts of the Highlands, as we shall see, but, near Inverness, the custom only survives in the memory of some old people. 154 Mr. Kirk’s wizards defended the lawfulness of their clairvoyance by the example of Elisha seeing Gehazi at a distance. 155 The second sight was hereditary in some families: this is no longer thought to be the case. Kirk gives some examples of clairvoyance, and prescience: he then quotes and criticises Lord Tarbatt’s letters to Robert Boyle. Second sight ‘is a trouble to most of them, and they would be rid of it at any rate, if they could’. One of our own informants says that the modern seers are anxious when they feel the vision beginning: they do not, however, regard the power as unholy or disreputable. Another informant mentions a belief that children born between midnight and one o’clock will be second-sighted. People attempt to hasten or delay the birth, so as to avoid the witching hour; clearly then they regard the second sight as an unenviable accomplishment. ‘It is certane’ says Kirk, ‘he sie more fatall and fearfull things, than he do gladsome.’ For the physical condition of the seer, Kirk describes it as ‘a rapture, transport, and sort of death’. Our contemporary informants deny that, in their experience, any kind of convulsion or fit accompanies the visions, as in Scott’s account of Allan Macaulay, in the Legend of Montrose.
Strangely unlike Mr. Kirk, in style and mode of thought, is his contemporary, the Rev. Mr. Frazer of Tiree and Coll; Dean of the Isles. We cannot call a clergyman superstitious because, 200 years ago, he believed in good and bad angels. Save for this element in his creed, Mr. Frazer may be called strictly and unexpectedly scientific. He was born in Mull in 1647, being the son of the Rev. Farquhard Frazer, a cadet of the house of Lovat. The father was one of the first Masters of Arts who ever held the living of Coll and Tiree: in his time only three landed gentlemen of the McLeans could read and write. The son, John, was educated at Glasgow 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.
