Transactions. 133 



Then, and only then, your lovely image shall be produced to the day, with 

 a reverence akin to devotion." 



IV. Diatifries in the Past. By Mr Peter GrAY of Cainberwell. 

 (Abridged.) 

 Whilst engaged in some researches among the books and 

 MSS. in the British Museum I came upon several references to 

 Dumfries, not perhaps very widely known, and I thought that 

 these, with some others occurring in books in my own possession, 

 although in themselves not of very mucli intrinsic importance, might 

 prove interesting to the members of the Society. They are not of 

 very great antiquity either, the earliest direct notice of the town 

 occurring in one of the Itineraries of John Ray. Ray was perhaps 

 the greatest naturalist between the times of Aristotle and Linnseus, 

 and his Itineraries are records of what were termed in his day 

 " simpling voyages," what are now known as botanical excursions 

 or rambles. Three of these journals were published after his 

 death, and it is from the second of them I am now going to quote. 

 He entered Scotland by way of Berwick in the middle of August, 

 1661, passed on to Edinburgh, thence to Glasgow, and from 

 Glasgow, through Lanarkshire, to Carlisle. " August, the 24th," 

 he writes, " we rode to Dumfreis, or, as they spelled it, Drumfrese. 

 . . . . At Dumfreis they have two ministers — one a young 

 man named Campbell, related, as we are told, to the M. of 

 Argyle; the other an elder man, by name Henderson, who has 

 married his daughter to the younger. Cami^bell prayed for the 

 preservation of their Church government and disciijline, and spoke 

 openly against jjrelacy and its adjuncts and consequences. Here, 

 as also at Dunbar and other })laces, we observed the manner of 

 their burials, which is this : When any one dies, the sexton, or 

 bellman, goeth about the streets with a small bell in his hand, 

 which he tinkleth all along as he goeth, and now and then he 

 makes a stand aud proclaims who is dead, and invites the people 

 to come to the funeral at such an hour. The people and minister 

 many times accompau}'^ the corpse to the grave at the time 

 appointed, with the bell before them, where there is nothing said, 

 but only the corpse laid in. The minister there, in the public 

 worship, does not shift places out of the desk into the pulpit, as 

 in England, but at his first coming in ascends the pulpit. They 

 commonly begin their worship with a psalm before the minister 

 comes in, who, after the psalm is finished, prayeth, and then reads 



