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' crossed the river, stopped at a hamlet, and returned, attended by a larger light. All three sank into the earth on the spot whence the two lights had risen. The minister threw a few stones on the spot, and next day asked the sexton who lay there. The man remembered having buried there two children of a blacksmith who lived at the hamlet on the opposite side of the water. The blacksmith died next day! This did more for second sight, probably, than all the minister's sermons could do against the belief.