They may be providential, or a sport of evolution, derived from “a complexionall Quality of the first acquirer,” which often becomes hereditary in his lineage. Lord Tarbott’s letter to an inquirer, Robert Boyle, is added by Mr. Kirk to his little treatise, with his own annotations. His belief that the Fairy sights could only be seen while the eyes are kept steady without twinkling, is attested by a well-known anecdote. On the afternoon of Culloden, a little girl, staying with Lord Lovat at Gortuleg, was reading in a window-seat. Chancing to look out, she saw a company of headlong riders hastening to the castle. Believing them to be the _Sleagh Maith_, she tried hard to keep her eyes from twinkling, that she might not lose the vision. But these, alas! were no Fairies, they were Prince Charles and his men flying from the victorious English. The tale proves that the belief long survived the day of the minister of Aberfoyle. Lord Tarbott mentions, also, the vision of the shroud on the breast of a man about to die, which seems to be alluded to in the prophecy of Theoclymenus in the _Odyssey_. Lord Tarbott’s tales are of the familiar kind, there are dozens of such in _Theophilus Insulanus_. Mr. Kirk’s notes are chiefly remarkable for his citation of Walter Grahame’s “evil eye,” which killed what he praised,—a world-wide superstition, too common to need supporting by foreign and classical examples. Unluckily, at this point Mr. Kirk abandons what we may call his scientific attitude. He has accounted for his “supernatural” affairs as not supernatural at all, but phenomena in Nature, and subject, like other phenomena, to laws. But now it occurs to him to explain the conduct of his _Sleagh Maith_ as the result of missionary zeal on their part: “they endeavour to convince us of a Deity;” though, on the face of his argument, a Co-walker no more proves a Deity than does an ordinary “walker.” He may have been reading “the learned Dr. Mor” (More the Platonist), and may have altered his ideas. His account of a girl who learned, or rather composed, a long poem by aid of “our nimble and courteous spirits,” affords an early example of what is called “an inspirational medium.” It is unlucky that Mr. Kirk did not publish this work, of which he had a copy. The ordinary “spiritual” poetry may be written, as Dr. Johnson said of _Ossian_, “by any one who would abandon his mind to it.” When Mr. Kirk maintains that Neolithic arrow-heads could not have been executed “by all the Airt of man,” he relapses from his usual odd common-sense. He also believes in men who are magically shot-proof, like Claverhouse, who had to be shot by a silver bullet; like Archbishop Sharp, on whom his pious assassins erroneously held that their bullets took no effect; and like certain soldiers mentioned by Dugald Dalgetty of Drumthwacket. This absurd belief was very generally held by the Covenanters. Where his local superstitions and those of his generation are not concerned, Mr.