78 Dumfriesshire and Galloway a Century Ago. 



I must not trespass long-er on your patience with a subject 

 which can hardly claim the dignity of antiquity, and is clearly not 

 within the scope of natural history. But such are briefly a few of 

 the most sug-gestive conditions of life in Galloway and Dumfries- 

 shire a century ago. In these days of telephones and phono- 

 graphs, electric lights and Rontgen rays, and all the rest of our 

 modern appliances, it requires almost an effort to grasp the fact 

 that those among us who have attained to middle-age have in 

 their younger days lived in intimate association with people for 

 whom such conditions as I have described were the familiar 

 surroundings of their youth. 



Cordial thanks were passed to Mrs Brown for her admirable 

 and interesting paper, on the motion of Dr Maxwell Ross, seconded 

 by Mr J. A. Moodie ; and a conversational discussion ensued, in 

 course of which some facts germane to the subject were brought 

 under review. Dr Ross observed that the people of the south of 

 Scotland were considered to be of high average height ; but with 

 regard to the height of the members of the county police, he 

 explained that nearly all the younger men are from the north-east 

 country. He further alluded to the practice of a minister in the 

 north utilising his pulpit for disseminating news to his congrega- 

 tion during the progress of the Napoleonic wars, in which many 

 of his congregation had friends engaged, by taking the newspaper 

 with him on Sunday and reading from it. Mr Moodie thought the 

 hard struggle for bare existence and gross pleasure disclosed by 

 the account made our ancestors appear almost savage in their way 

 of livmg. Mr \V. Dickie remarked that his commiseration of 

 them was tempered by a good deal of admiration, and contended 

 that amid much that was deplorable there existed a great deal of 

 spiritual and mental activity among the peasantry. He spoke to 

 having witnessed in this town an attenuated survival of the 

 custom of serving whisky out of doors to persons attending a 

 funeral. With reference to the witchcraft trial at Kirkcudbright 

 in 1805, he explained that the charge there was not for possession 

 of supernatural power —in which the judicial class had then ceased 

 to believe — but of imposition by pretending to the possession of 

 such powers. 



The Chairman (Mr Barbour) spoke of the important part 

 played in the social economy of the times by pedlars and chapman 

 literature, and he supported the view that a large serious element 



