“I remember,” says a certain Mr. George Garden in a letter written from Aberdeen in 1676, “when Mrs. Scougall and I were with you last summer, we had occasion to speak of a man in this country very remarkable for something peculiar in his temper, that inclines him to imitate unawares all the gestures and motions of those with whom he converses. We then had never seen him ourselves. Since our return we were together at Strathbogie where he dwells, and notwithstanding all we had heard of him before, were somewhat surprized with the oddness of this dotterel quality. This person named Donald Munro, being a little old and very plain man, of a thin slender body, has been subject to this infirmity, as he told us, from his very infancy. He is very loath to have it observed, and therefore casts down his eyes when he walks in the streets, and turns them aside when he is in company. We had made several trials before he perceived our design, and afterwards had much ado to make him stay. We caressed him as much as we could, and had then the opportunity to observe that he imitated not only the scratching of the head, but also the wringing of the hands, wiping of the nose, stretching forth of the arms, &c., and we needed not strain compliments to persuade him to be covered, for he still put off and on as he saw us do, and all this with so much exactness, and yet with such a natural and unaffected air that we could not so much as suspect that he did it on design. When we held both his hands and caused another to make such motions, he pressed to get free; but when we would have known more particularly how he found himself affected, he could only give us this simple answer, that it vexed his heart and his brain.” The writer of this letter had hit upon the solution of the idiosyncracy which he describes, but had not perceived it. The man had been a dotterel. “Have we not heard,” said the Doctor, “of persons who have ruminated? Do we not read well authenticated cases of some whose skins were tuberculated? Is it not recorded of Dioscorides, not the botanist but the Alexandrian physician of Cleopatra's time, that he was called Phacas because his body was covered with warts? And where was this so likely to have happened as in Egypt? He had been a crocodile. The cases are more frequent of people who in the scaliness of their skins have borne testimony of their piscine origin.”