He also records the fact that a Scotch empiric of the seventeenth century professed the cure of those "'visseit with frenacies, madness, falling evil (epilepsy), persones distractit in their wittis, and with feirful apparitiones, etc., and utheris uncouth diseases; all done be sorcerie, incantation, devellische charmeing.' Above forty persons are enumerated for whom he had prescribed, for which he was strangled and burnt as too familiar with Satan."[32] The same author relates that a poor woman having become frantic, the alleged author of the malady came, and "laying hands on hir, she convaleschit and receivit hir sinsis agane."[33] This was in 1616. Insane persons were sometimes treated with holy water, to which _salt_ was added, with the idea that the devil abhorred salt as the emblem of immortality (we have already had to notice this use of salt among the Saxons). Hence it was "consecrated by the papists, as profiting the health of the body, and for the banishment of demons." A certain remedial "watter," used in Scotland by wise women or herbalists, is supposed to have contained the same ingredient. Elspeth Sandisone, in 1629, was bereft of her senses. One Richart was thus accused of having tried to cure her. "Ye call the remedie 'watter forspeking,' and took watter into ane round cape and went out into the byre, and took sumthing out of your purse lyk unto great salt, and did cast thairin, and did spit thrie severall times in the samen; and ye confest yourself when ye had done so, ye _aunchit in bitts_, quhilk is ane Norne terme, quhilk is to say ye blew your braith thairin and thairefter ye sent it to the said Elspeth with the servand woman of the hous, and bad that the said Elspeth sould be waschit thairin, hands and feit, and scho sould be als holl as ever scho was."[34] I may give here a curious illustration of insanity being induced, not cured, by superstition in Scotland. John Law's servant "rane wode" when John Knox had retreated to St. Andrews during the civil contentions of his later years. The story is thus quaintly told in Bannatyne's "Journal" (p. 309). John Law of that city, being in Edinburgh Castle in January, 1572, "the ladie Home wald neidis thraip in his face that he was banist the said toune because that, in the yarde reasit (rose) sum sanctis, among whome cam up the devill with hornis, which when his servant Ritchart saw, rane wode, and so deit."[35] But I must not dwell longer on the treatment of lunatics by the Highlanders, or the superstitions of Scotland in this connection, and will now say a few words in reference to Ireland.