Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/95

Rh consulting charmers is exaggerated; but I believe that recourse to the charmer is more usual and more openly had than, for example, in Wales, where those who consult a dyn hyspys or 'wise man' have to do it secretly, and at the risk of being expelled by their co-religionists from the Seiet or 'Society'. There is somewhat in the atmosphere of Man to remind one rather of the Wales of a past generation, the Wales of the Rev. Edmund Jones, author of a Relation of Apparitions of Spirits in the County of Monmouth and the Principality of Wales (Newport, 1813), a book which its author tells us was "designed to confute and to prevent the infidelity of denying the being and apparition of spirits, which tends to irreligion and atheism". That little volume not only deserves to be known to the Psychical Society, but it might be consulted with a certain amount of advantage by folk-lorists.

The Manx peasantry are perhaps the most independent and prosperous in the British Isles; but their position geographically and politically has been favourable to the continuance of ideas not quite up to the level of the latest papers on Darwinism and Evolution read at our Church Congresses in this country. This you may say is here wide of the mark; but, after giving you in my first paper specimens of rather ancient superstitions as recently known in the Island, it is but right that you should have an idea of the surroundings in which they have lingered into modern times. Perhaps nothing will better serve to bring this home to your minds than the fact, for which there is abundant evidence, that old people still living remember men and women clad in white sheets doing penance publicly in the churches of Man. Some of the penitents have only been dead some six or seven years, nay, it is possible, for anything I know, that one or two may be still alive. This seems to us in this country to belong, so to say, to ancient history, and it transports us to a state of things which we find it hard to realise. The lapse of years has brought about profounder changes in our greater Isle of