The Gaelic name ‘_Buidseach_’ is identical in meaning with the English ‘_witch_,’ a word it also somewhat resembles in form. The term ‘_Bao_’ is sometimes translated wizard, but is properly only a careless conversational form of _Baobh_, a wild furious woman, a wicked mischievous female, who scolds and storms and curses, caring neither what she says nor what she does, praying the houses may be razed (_làrach lom_) and the property destroyed (_sgrios an codach_) of those who have offended her. This is a word used in proverbs. “A raging woman obtains her imprecation, but her soul obtains no mercy.”[1] _Baoth_, weak, foolish, is often confounded with it. M’Intosh[2] makes the expression ‘_maca bao_,’ ‘a wizard’s son’ instead of _macan baoth_, a weak or little child. “Pity of her who is the mother of a helpless child, when May-day falls on a Thursday,” _i.e._[3] owing to the infant mortality of the season. A common answer to the question, What could witches do? is What could they not do? The classes of actions, however, ascribed to them are not numerous. They could take the milk from their neighbours’ cattle, bring fish to their own coasts, make fishermen successful, go to sea for fish themselves and bring home creelfuls, raise storms, sink ships, drown those who offended them; give strings to sailors with knots on them, the unloosening of which raised the wind; they could go to wine-cellars in London or Ireland, and drink wine till morning; fly through the air with magic quickness, and cross the seas in the most unlikely vessels, sieves, eggshells, or dry cowsherds; produce a wasting disease in an enemy, waylay and endanger the belated traveller, and by their cursed tricks keep a child in its mother’s womb past its proper time; suck cows, and assume various shapes. They could benefit, or at least ward away evil from a favourite, but their power of doing so seems to have been much feebler than their powers of mischief.