nus gives a similar account. The
whole performance, except that the seer is not bound, resembles the
Eskimo 'sleep of the shadow,' more than ordinary Highland second
sight. The soul of the seer is understood to be wandering away,
released from his body.

The belief in clairvoyance, in the power of seeing what is distant,
and foreseeing what is in the future, obviously and undeniably
occurs everywhere, in ancient Israel, as in Mexico before the
Spanish Conquest, and among the Red Indian tribes as among the
Zulus. It is more probable that similar hallucinatory experiences,
morbid, or feigned, or natural, have produced the same beliefs
everywhere, than that the beliefs were evolved only by 'Aryans,'--
Greeks or Scandinavians--and by them diffused all over the world, to
Zulus, Lapps, Indians of Guiana, Maoris.

One of the earliest references to Scotch second sight is quoted by
Graham Dalyell from Higden's Polychronicon (i. lxiv.). {231a}
'There oft by daye tyme, men of that islonde seen men that bey dede
to fore honde, byheded' (like Argyll, in 1661), 'or hole, and what
dethe they deyde. Alyens setten theyr feet upon feet of the men of
that londe, for to see such syghtes as the men of that londe doon.'
This method of communicating the hallucination by touch is described
in the later books, such as Kirk's Secret Commonwealth (1691), and
Mr. Napier, in his Folklore, mentions the practice as surviving in
the present century. From some records of the Orkneys, Mr. Dalyell
produces a trial for witchcraft on Oct. 2, 1616. {231b} This case
included second sight. The husband of Jonka Dyneis being in a
fishing-boat at Walls, six miles from her residence at Aith, and in
peril, she was 'fund and sein standing at hir awin hous wall, in ane
trans, that same hour he was in danger; and being trappit, she could
not give answer, bot stude as bereft of hir senssis: and quhen she
was speirit at quhy she wes so movit, she answerit, "Gif our boit be
not tynt, she is in great hazard,"--and wes tryit so to be'.

Elspeth Reoch, in 1616, was tried as a witch for a simple piece of
clairvoyance, or of charlatanism, as we may choose to believe. The
offence is styled 'secund sicht' in the official report. Again,
Issobell Sinclair, in 1633, was accused, almost in modern
spiritualistic phrase, of 'bein _controlled_ with the phairie, and
that be thame, shoe hath the second sight'. {232a} Here, then, we
find it officially recorded that the se