ated
into a new religious sect by the operation of social laws, they
become what is sometimes called mere superstition, that kind of
superstition which consists of using the same power of logic to a
narrow set of facts which primitive man was in the habit of using, and
thus repeating in this age the methods of primitive science. We cannot
quite understand this in the age of railways and schools and
inventions, but it will be understood better if we go back for only a
generation or two to those parts of our country which are most remote
from civilising influences, and obtain some information as to their
condition.

This cannot be better accomplished than by referring to a Scottish
author writing, in 1835, of the superstitions then prevailing in
Scotland. "Our whole genuine records," says Dalyell,

"teem with the most repulsive pictures of the
weakness, bigotry, turbulence, and fierce and
treacherous cruelty of the populace. False and corrupt
innovations of literature, a compound of facts and
fiction, intermingling the old and the new in
heterogeneous assemblage, would persuade us to think
much more of our forefathers than they thought of
themselves. Scotland, until the most modern date, was
an utter stranger to civilisation, presenting a
sterile country with a famished people, wasted by
hordes of mendicants readier to seize than to
solicit--void of ingenious arts and useful
manufactures, possessed of little skill and learning,
plunged in constant war and rapine, full of
insubordination, disturbing public rule and private
peace. For waving pendants, flowing draperies,
brilliant colours, eagles' feathers, herons' plumes,
feasts or festivals so splendid in imagination, let
naked limbs, scanty, sombre garments to elude
discovery by the foe, bits of heath stuck in bonnets
if they had them, precarious sustenance, abject
humility and all those hardships inseparable from
uncultivated tribes and countries be instituted as a
juster portrait of earlier generations."[237]

This statement as to Scotland is correctly drawn from social
conditions which have now passed away, but which, down to the
beginning of last century, belonged to the ordinary life of the
people. Thus it is recorded that

"over all the highlands of Scotland, and in this
county in common with others, th