[Footnote 221: On this subject I elsewhere published, two years ago, the following remarks:--"The medical science and medical lore of the past has become, after a succession of ages, the so-called folk-lore and superstitious usages of times nearer our own. Up to the end of the last century, patients attacked with insanity were occasionally dipped in lakes and wells, and left bound in the neighbouring church for a night. Loch Maree, in Ross-shire, and St. Fillan's Pool, in Perthshire, were places in which such unfortunate patients were frequently dipped. Heron, in his _Journey through Scotland_ in the last century, states that it was affirmed that two hundred invalids were carried annually to St. Fillan's for the cure of various diseases, but principally of insanity. The proceedings at this famous pool were in such cases an imitation of the old Greek and Roman worship of AEsculapius. Patients consulting the AEsculapian priest were purified first of all, by bathing in some sacred well; and then having been allowed to enter into and sleep in his temple, the god, or rather some priest of the god, came in the darkness of the night and told them what treatment they were to adopt. The poor lunatics brought to St. Fillan's were, in the same way, first purified by being bathed in his pool, and then laid bound in the neighbouring church during the subsequent night. If they were found loose in the morning, a full recovery was confidently looked for, but the cure remained doubtful when they were found at morning dawn still bound. I was lately informed by the Rev. Mr Stewart of Killin, that in one of the last cases so treated--and that only a few years ago--the patient was found sane in the morning, and unbound; a dead relative, according to the patient's own account, having entered the church during the night, and loosened her both from the ropes that bound her body and the delusions that warped her mind. It was a system of treatment by mystery and terrorism that might have made some sane persons insane; and hence, perhaps, conversely, some insane persons sane. Mr. Pennant tells us that at Llandegla, in Wales, where similar rites were performed for the cure of insanity, viz., purification in the sacred well, and forced detention of the patient for a night in the church, under the communion-table, the lunatics or their friends were obliged to leave a cock in the church if he were a male, and a hen if she were a female--an additional circumstance in proof of the AEsculapian type of the superstition. But perhaps, after all, the whole is a medical or mythological belief, older than Greece or Rome, and which was common to the whole Aryan or Indo-European race in Asia before they sent off, westward, over Europe, those successive waves of population that formed the nations of the Celt and Teuton, of the Goth, and Greek, and Latin. The cock is still occasionally sacrificed in the Highlands for the cure of epilepsy and convulsions.