been made. The experiments in this case again were not such as need to be repeated; but the actual mode of death was certainly not exceptionally painful. The animals here being warm-blooded, and the surrounding medium not water but air, the temperature was much higher than in the above case of the frog; but it was considerably under the 260° Fahr. which men have endured for many minutes with perfect impunity, and not nearly sufficiently high to char or blister the surfacetissues. The stages of death were faintness and exhaustion, passing on into coma, and finally some convulsive movements. What this means, as compared with "baking alive," anyone can judge by imagining his own state of mind if, after he had been condemned to the one, his sentence were suddenly changed to the other. Again: knowledge once gained does not need to be re-established; and it may be said as a rule that the earlier and more salient facts of physiology are those requiring the roughest experimental methods. Even apart from the change of character wrought by anaesthetics, ample testimony has been given to the diminution of the need for the severer sorts of operations, parallel with the increasing organisation of facts; and it is hard even to imagine any object now for experiments at all comparable to Bell's on recurrent sensibility. The pain of toxicological experiments is almost invariably short; and the distress of induced diseases, not more painful than those by which we expect that the majority of ourselves will die, cannot weigh for a moment against the expected benefits both to men and animals, in the dawn of which Pasteur's contemporaries may be proud to live.

These examples may suggest the sort of facts which cannot be too often repeated, or too carefully explained, and which are ten times more convincing to a layman than the most imposing array of testimonials to character or of ex cathedrâ judgments. But I do not believe that even the best instructors can exercise their legitimate influence on popular opinion, or meet opposition in a really effective way, without paying more heed to the bearings of the various points before discussed-points which, obvious enough, and coming with no force at all from me, only need to be fully and fairly recognised by them to make the future of English physiology secure.

EDMUND GURNEY.

The Social State of the Hebrides Two Centuries ago.

THE aim of this paper is to give a few sketches of the strange social state of the Highlands and Isles at the date of the Union. The sketches are taken from a somewhat searching study of material unearthed within the past few years at various spots along the western seaboard, and may be accepted as true or only too real.

The first thing that impresses the student of the state of society in the Isles at that period is the remarkable excess to which whisky-drinking was carried by nearly all classes. Mr. Martin, a native of Skye, and a staunch advocate of Highland virtues, made a tour through the Hebrides and out as far as St. Kilda shortly after the revolution. He found various kinds of whisky. There was the ordinary Usquebaugh, which the well-seasoned Hebrideans could drink in large quantities without much apparent harm; there was a very fiery spirit called Freslerig, or whisky three times distilled; and, much stronger than either, there was a third kind, known as Usquebaugh baul, of which two spoonfuls would stagger the most creditable toper. To an ordinary tippler a glass of this spirit meant instant death. In those days whisky was made from potatoes and heather as well as from barley. A great deal of it was manufactured at home; it was hot, coarse, and raw, and all who could afford it drank deeply. Sunday was the great day of riot and debauch, in spite of the most strenuous efforts of the Kirk and the Kirk Sessions. Nothing was more repugnant to the people than the long Presbyterian services introduced in the reign of Dutch William, and they evaded them in every possible way. To the minister and his officebearers they pled all sorts of excuses, or they tried to baffle them in every conceivable way. The chief mode of spending Sunday was to congregate in little country public-houses, or wayside shebeens, of which there was a large number in nearly every parish, and there to riot and amuse themselves over the forbidden cup. In the records of several parishes I find that the authorities tried hard to check these disgraceful practices. Sometimes they went in couples through the clachan or hamlet, during the stated hours of service, taking note of all whom they found lurking in the drinking bothies; sometimes the beadle was deputed to watch the notorious drunkards; and when the people pled the distance from church and the means of grace, the elders were appointed to gather them into barns and read the Bible to them whilst the minister was preaching in the parish church. But, notwithstanding the vigilance of the beadle and the stern efforts of the elders to keep the Sabbath a day

of serious behaviour, the people, in spite of fines, mulcts, juggs, canvas sheets, and pointed reproofs from the pulpit, held by their wild drinking habits. Even great religious occasions or excitement and in those days great wars of religious excitement or revival passed over the land— only stimulated the craving of the people for strong drink. In one of the local records I got an account of a great Communion season which sprang out of one of these revivals, and which lasted altogether five days. The messengers who went to the nearest town for the elements, i.e. the bread and wine, took two days in crossing a narrow ferry, and had to sleep away the effects of deep intoxication at both sides of it. On the Monday after the Communion two of the hearers were picked up dead drunk near the preaching tent, where they had fallen down on the previous Lord's day. No Highland parish is better known to the general reader than that now ruled over by the High Priest of Morven, around which the robust imagination of successive generations of gigantic McLeods has cast a veil of charming romance. I have before me an unpublished letter, written nearly two centuries ago, which gives rather a ghastly picture of the state of the parish-the poorly tilled soil, the squalid huts that had no walls, the lean features of the peasantry, and the drunken habits of the lairds. The writer was well educated, the head of one of the proudest families in the Western Isles, and one with the oldest and most genuine pedigree. He and his party started from Oban in a skiff to pay some visits in Morven and Mull. The first landing place was Kinlochalim, then a place of some note, for it had not yet become a cave of Adullam for the outcast of the neighbouring clans. As the party had mounted with the intention of riding up the country, they were greeted with tremendous bellowing from a neighbouring whisky-shop, out of which four gentlemen of good position in the district came gloriously full at one o'clock in the afternoon. The gentlemen were cursing and swearing at their hardest; they saluted their friends with great heartiness, and kicked a poor "Lazarus of a smith" on to the nearest refuse heap to show their native contempt for indoor artisans. A few days after they came to a laird's house, where a kind of househeating was to take place, and where consequently extra hospitality was shown. They sat down at four o'clock in the afternoon, and drank on till three next morning, with the result that of the gentlemen three were barbarously drunk, three more in a tipsy maudlin state, and two, of whom the writer professed to be one, moderately sober. They were carried to sleep on the floor of the barn, and the ladies, more than half-adozen, slept upon the floor of the room where this heavy carousal had been going on for eleven hours on end.

I find traces of another singular drinking custom lingering after the Union. When leagues of friendship were formed between families or between neighbouring septs, the treaty was ratified by the contracting parties drinking a drop of each other's blood drawn from the little finger. To drink blood warm from the animal or after it had coagulated was not

considered nauseous. In times of famine the cattle, poor and lean as they were, were largely bled, and their blood made an article of food by the starving natives. Phlebotomy was considered a cure for all ailments, physical and mental. Man and beast were regularly bled on the Sundays at the little roadside shebeens. Even as late as the time of Pennant the Duke of Hamilton employed a doctor to go round the island of Arran and bleed the people of each duchan twice a year into pits dug in the ground.

Some of the Hebridean customs two centuries ago were very picturesque. Chief among these was the ceremony of marriage. Some of the proceedings that heralded the event cannot now be quoted. The wedding itself was a very great affair, as it always has been in mountainous countries. It was marked by a prodigality of expense, and was the occasion of much genuine joy. All the oldest ballads give a wedding feast of at least some days. All the relatives down to the fourteenth cousin, and the neighbours, with at least three hamlets or glens, were invited; the wild Highland dances, inspired by mirth and strong spirits, went round; all the pipers within reach assisted; the young couple were disposed of, and merrymaking went on until many of the festive party vanished in utter powerlessness. The oldest Session records abundantly prove that these festivals and days of rejoicing were frequently the occasion of various excesses. The marriage tie was not always held sacred, and purity of life was rather the exception. The old laws of divorce were singular enough. To the church of Kilkivan there is a tradition attached which illustrates a phase of the practice. The patron saint gave all ill-assorted couples yearly the chance of escaping blindfold from their bonds and getting a substitute. Whether or not this tradition represents a fact, it is certain that more absurd customs prevailed throughout the Isles.

Martin, when giving an account of the small outer isles belonging to McNeill of Barra, states that when a tenant's wife died, either on Barra or on any of the adjacent isles, the tenant addressed himself to the McNeill, representing his loss, and at the same time desiring that he would be pleased to recommend a wife to him to manage his affairs. The chief found a suitable partner for his clansman, and as soon as the widower got her name he proceeded to her residence, carrying a bottle of strong whisky with him, and the marriage was consummated without much further delay or ceremony. So, also, the disconsolate widow hurried to her chief, McNeill of Barra, and he speedily found a suitable successor to the departed. McNeill, however, was more than usually patriarchal, and appears to have done everything for everybody on his vast estates. Another incident related by Martin illustrates a very curious phase of social life. An islander, who was looking out for a wife, happened to receive a shilling, which he supposed was a coin of extraordinary value, from a shipwrecked seaman. He went straightway with his precious treasure to Mr. Morrison, the parish minister, and requested him on his

next visit to Lewis to buy a wife with the money, and bring her home to him. The idea of wife-purchase has long since died out amongst the Hebrideans, but that of the inferiority of woman still survives. She is still in several islands the ordinary beast of burden, and the general slave of her lord and master.

Captain Burt, who wrote in the blunt style of the English soldier, gives a picture of the state of Highland society that agrees in all essentials with the above sketches. According to him, in the inland parts of the North women did nearly all the hard work, and were the common carriers of the day. A person who was a gentleman by birth and descent-in other words, who could claim something like a fortieth cousinship with the chief of the clan-would not condescend to turn his hand to anything, or do any kind of manual labour. His idea of aristocratic life was total abstinence from toil. But all the while he allowed his wife and daughters to toil away like slaves, and felt their slaving to reflect no discredit upon himself. A French officer, travelling through Inverness-shire on a recruiting expedition, met one of these mighty gentlemen marching in a lordly manner, in a good pair of brogues, whilst his wife was trudging barefoot some distance behind him. The irate Frenchman, in his gallantry, leaped off his horse, and compelled the man of long descent to take off his brogues, and his wife to put them on.

The poverty was very great. Along with poverty there was much coarseness in living and rampant immorality, in spite of the persistent displeasure of the kirk. Children were fearfully neglected in all ranks of society from their birth upwards, and the law of the survival of the fittest was allowed to have full and free scope. When a small tenant's wife had twins in the Outer Hebrides, the laird took one of them to be brought up in his family, and I have found traces of as many as sixteen or twenty of these twins living under the same roof at the same time. Servant-girls slept in the byre with the cows. Some of them took off their clothes only when they went into rags, though frequently, as Burt significantly states, a change of dress occasionally would be a gain in the public interest. Plebeian girls of every grade, though in some respects thoroughly moral, rose in general esteem and in the public opinion of their social circle if they were fortunate enough in having attracted the illicit attentions of the laird or a gentleman, as that gave them a sort of relationship with the local aristocracy. Such was one of the distortions of custom. Even the lairds and their wives were so poor that frequently the latter had to go barefoot, and that the former, in spite of their lofty hereditary notions, had to make a very sorry appearance in public. Comfort was seldom studied. In some of the Isles it was customary to cook the mutton in the skin for want of a more suitable cooking vessel. Towards the end of spring, the season of direst hardship, when often the lean cattle were so weak that they could not rise or stand upright, the emaciated people were known to live upon a little oatmeal mixed with blood drawn from those exhausted beasts; and though there was plenty