“The shepherds of the Hebrid Isles” are usually credited with the largest possession of the gift, but the doctrine was well known over the whole Highlands, and as firmly believed in Ross-shire and the highlands of Perthshire as in the remotest Hebrides. Waldron describes it as existing in his time in the Isle of Man. It is a Celtic belief, and the suggestion that it is the remains of the magic of the Druids is not unreasonable. In every age there are individuals who are spectre-haunted, and it is probable enough that the sage Celtic priests, assuming the spectres to be external, reduced the gift of seeing them to a system, a belief in which formed part of their teaching. This accounts for the circumstance that the second sight has flourished more among the Celts than any other race. The Gaelic name _da-shealladh_ does not literally mean “the second sight,” but “the two sights.” The vision of the world of sense is _one_ sight, ordinarily possessed by all, but the world of spirits is visible only to certain persons, and the possession of this additional vision gives them “the two sights,” or what comes to the same thing, “a second sight.” Through this faculty they see the ghosts of the dead revisiting the earth, and the fetches, doubles, or apparitions of the living. The world to which apparitions belong is called by writers on the second sight “the world of spirits,” but the expression does not convey correctly the idea attached to visions of the kind. The object seen, usually that of a friend or acquaintance, the phantasm, phantom, apparition, or whatever else we choose to call it, was recognised to be as independent of the person whose semblance it bore as it was of the person seeing it. He knew nothing of the phantom’s appearance, it was not his spirit, and played its part without his knowledge or his wish. The seer, again, could not, or did not, trace it to anything in himself; it did not arise from any suggestion of his hopes or fears, and was not a reproduction of any former state of his mind or thought. As to its owing its origin to anything abnormal in himself, he was (as far as he could judge) as healthy in mind and body as other people. As long, therefore, as men believed the phantasm to be an external reality, they were compelled to believe in doubles, or semblances, that move in a world which is neither that of sense nor that of spirits. The actions and appearances of these doubles have no counterpart in any past or present event, and naturally are referred to the future and the distant. The object seen, or phantasm, is called _taibhs_ (pron. _taïsh_), the person seeing it _taibhsear_ (pron. _taïsher_), and the gift of vision, in addition to its name of second sight, is known as _taibhsearachd_. It is noticeable that many words referring to spirits and ghosts begin with this syllable _ta_. The following are worth noticing: