lii INTRODUCTION. 



PATRICK SELLAR'S TRIAL. 



Shortly after my " Highland Clearances " appeared, Mr. 

 Thomas Sellar, eldest son of the late Patrick Sellar, com- 

 plained that I did not make enough of the fact that his 

 father was acquitted of the charges of Culpable Homicide 

 and Fire-raising in the Inverness Court of Justiciary. I 

 have since published a report of the trial separately, and it 

 is reproduced in full in this volume. I trust that Mr. Sellar 

 will be satisfied with the circulation I have secured for it. 

 I am perfectly content to leave the public to judge of the 

 whole question in dispute from this report of the trial. 

 Mr. Sellar would have been much better to have let sleeping 

 dogs lie, but that is his affair. He has chosen to publish a 

 book in reply to those who believe that his father was 

 largely responsible for the Sutherland Clearances. He has 

 as completely failed in his object, as he would have failed 

 in an attempt to turn the ocean into dry land. His book 

 answers itself. By its publication, he has, however, chal- 

 lenged further discussion of the whole question in dispute. 



A valued correspondent, well acquained with the history 

 and traditions of Sutherland, oral and written, on seeing 

 an intimation that such a book was forthcoming, wrote to 

 me as follows : " I see the Sellars are moved against you 

 for exhibiting the part their famous father took in the 

 atrocities committed in Sutherland ; that one of them is to 

 write a book in vindication of their father ! Well, I have 

 heard a fetish, to wit, that ' a clear-eyed person 

 could distinguish the dust of the righteous from that of the 

 wicked in the same grave; that the dust of the former lay still, 

 but in that of the latter there was a perpetual vermicular 

 motion which prevented it taking rest or being still'. It would 

 appear that the memory of the unenviable Sellar is doomed 



