Not that that teaching has been without effect; and we may hope that with the extension of communications and the progress gradually being made to that condition of things where “Man to man the world o’er Shall brithers be for a’ that,” the _bad e’e_ may some day in these isles be merely a study for folklorists as Totemism is, and as difficult to find as an auk’s egg. Right or wrong, the theory here advanced accounts, satisfactorily, as far as the writer can judge, for the present-day widespread belief in Scotland of the power for evil of the glance of the human eye. As will be seen afterwards, there are those who theorise on the bad heart influencing the eye, the ill effect of the Evil Eye only arising from the glance of the covetous; but this is probably the result of preconceived religious ideas, and of the moral teaching to which its believers have been accustomed. It is not to be wondered at; it would be impossible indeed, but that the teaching of Christianity should have affected and given a direction to this ancient superstition. Thus we find it Christianised to a marked degree, its origin is conceived of as a breaking of the commandment “Thou shalt not covet,” and its cures are mostly connected with a reference to the Deity, and to the Trinity of the Christian. The magic thread with the three knots on it, though heathen in its origin, has surely some connection with the rosary, the aspersion with water, with baptism, and the holy water of the Roman Church. But it is not a superstition introduced with Christianity, it is as native as the heather of our hills, or the sandstone rock of the Coronation Stone. This statement might be safely enough advanced upon general principles, but we are not without satisfactory literary evidence of what we advance. In the Ossianic “_Acallam na Senorach_” (The Colloquy with the Ancient Men), the second longest prose composition of the mediæval Irish, a collection (probably made in the late twelfth or thirteenth century) of separate stories united together in one framework, we find the following as related in MSS. of the fifteenth century and later. The Fiann are on a visit to the King of Munster. The son of the King of Ulster marries the daughter of the King of Munster. “The damsel bore him a famous and beautiful son named Fer Oc (‘young man’), and in all Ireland there were scarcely one whose shape and vigour and spear-casting were as good as his.”