Archaic Nature-worship--Deification of Water Metaphors--Divination by Water--Persistence of Paganism--Shony--Superstitions of Sailors and Fishermen--Sea Serpent--Mer-folk--Sea Charms--Taking Animals into the Sea--Rescuing from Drowning--Ancient Beliefs about Rivers--Dead and Living Ford--Clay Image--Dunskey--Lakes--Dow Loch--St. Vigeans--St. Tredwell's Loch--Wells of Spey and Drachaldy--Survival of Well-worship--Disappearance of Springs--St. Margaret's Well--Anthropomorphism of Springs--Celtic Influence--Cream of the Well. In glancing at the superstitions connected with Scottish lochs and springs, we are called upon to scan a chapter of our social history not yet closed. A somewhat scanty amount of information is available to explain the origin and growth of such superstitions, but enough can be had to connect them with archaic nature-worship. In the dark dawn of our annals much confusion existed among our ancestors concerning the outer world, which so strongly appealed to their senses. They had very vague notions regarding the difference between what we now call the Natural and the Supernatural. Indeed all nature was to them supernatural. They looked on sun, moon, and star, on mountain and forest, on river, lake, and sea as the abodes of divinities, or even as divinities themselves. These divinities, they thought, could either help or hurt man, and ought therefore to be propitiated. Hence sprang certain customs which have survived to our own time. Men knocked at the gate of Nature, but were not admitted within. From the unknown recesses there came to them only tones of mystery. In ancient times water was deified even by such civilised nations as the Greeks and Romans, and to-day it is revered as a god by untutored savages. Sir John Lubbock, in his "Origin of Civilisation," shows, by reference to the works of travellers, what a hold this cult still has in regions where the natives have not yet risen above the polytheistic stage of religious development. Dr. E. B. Tylor forcibly remarks, in his "Primitive Culture," "What ethnography has to teach of that great element of the religion of mankind, the worship of well and lake, brook and river, is simply this--that what is poetry to us was philosophy to early man; that to his mind water acted not by laws of force, but by life and will; that the water-spirits of primæval mythology are as souls which cause the water's rush and rest, its kindness and its cruelty; that, lastly, man finds in the beings which, with such power, can work him weal and woe, deities with a wider influence over his life, deities to be feared and loved, to be prayed to and praised, and propitiated with sacrificial gifts." In speaking of inanimate objects, we often ascribe life to them; but our words are metaphors, and nothing more. At an earlier time such phrases expressed real beliefs, and were not simply the outcome of a poetic imagination. Keats, in one of his Sonnets, speaks of