Simpson was born in the village of Bathgate, in Linlithgowshire, where his father, David Simpson, was the local baker. David's father, who died at the ripe age of ninety-one a few years after James's birth, was the descendant of a line of small hard-working farmers, who added to his work and his profit the practice of farriery. Although modern science has, by the aid of bacteriology, proved such practitioners of the rough veterinary medicine of the day to have been right in ascribing to unseen influences many of the diseases of animals which they found themselves powerless to check, the methods they employed for treatment when what they called witchcraft was at work scarcely have the support of present-day practitioners. In one of his addresses upon archaeology Simpson records how his grandfather ordered and his own father took part in the burial alive of a cow in order to appease the evil spirit which was spreading the plague of murrain with fatal effect. And the older gentleman was known to have had more than one serious encounter with a witch. On one occasion an old beggar woman, who plied her calling in quite an original method--that of being wheeled in a barrow from farm to farm--hurled curses at old Simpson for ordering a servant to wheel her from his house on to her next calling-place, and vowed an awful vengeance on his family if he did not replace the servant with one of his stalwart sons. The farmer recollected that an ill event had followed the old woman's last visit, and quickly drew a sharp flint from his pocket and made a gash across her forehead with it. "Ah," he exclaimed, "I see what ye're noo, ye auld witch; but I've scored ye aboon the braith and my house is safe." Simpson noted these and many other curious practices and beliefs, and afterwards pointed out in one of his addresses that they were probably, for the most part, relics of the pagan creeds and customs of our ancestors. He urged the making of a collection of the folk-lore of Scotland, ere it utterly disappeared before the march of modern civilisation, and suggested that, perhaps, some archaeological Cuvier might one day be able to re-construct from these mythological fragments distinct pictures of the heathen practices, rites, and faiths of our forefathers.