We have spoken of the guardian spirits of lochs and springs. That such spirits should have been thought to exist is not surprising. Since water is one of the necessaries of life for man and beast, animals had to frequent pools and rivers. What more natural than that, in days of ignorance, these animals should have been regarded as in some mysterious way connected with the spots they frequented. In the same way, fish darting about in the water would be considered its indwelling spirits. It may not seem to us at all needful, that lochs and springs should have guardian spirits at all. But man, in a certain stage of development, thinks of nature, organic and inorganic alike, as having a life akin to his own, with powers superior to his own. From a belief in guardian spirits, to a belief in the necessity of offering gifts to them is an easy transition. A present is sometimes an expression of good-will, sometimes of a desire to obtain benefits to the giver. Offerings at lochs and springs were undoubtedly of the latter class, and were intended either to avert evil or to procure good. In ancient times in India, when a dragon presided over a spring, the people of the district were in the habit of invoking his aid, when they wanted rain or fine weather. Certain ceremonies were necessary to procure the boon. "The chief characteristic of the serpents throughout the East in all ages," remarks Dr. Fergusson, "seems to have been their power over the wind and the rain, which they exert for either good or evil as their disposition prompts." As we have seen, certain wells in our own land could control the weather. This was so, even when the guardian spirit of the spring assumed no definite shape. The rites required to obtain the desired object were nothing less than an acknowledgment of the spirit's existence. The origin of the connection between weather and wells can only be guessed at. It appears that the splashing of a spring when an object was thrown into it, or the sprinkling of the water over the neighbouring ground, was thought to cause rain, through what may be called a dramatic representation of a shower. Why this should have been so, cannot be determined with certainty. Probably accidental acts of the kind described were followed, in some instances, by a fall of rain, and the belief may have sprung up that between the two there existed the relation of cause and effect. There was thus a confusion between what logicians call the post hoc and the propter hoc. The same explanation may perhaps account for the belief that a favourable breeze could be obtained, as in the case of the Gigha Well, by the performance of certain definite rites.