198 THE GANNET 



worth £200 per annum.* Here is excellent fresh water m this 

 isle, a dainty pure spring which is to be the more admired. 

 The isle of May is not hence above three leagues, and it is 

 easy to be discerned, wherein also abundance of fowl breed." 



Brereton does not seem to have landed on the Bass, but 

 only to have viewed it from the mainland. Professor 

 Newton suggests that the " storts " here mentioned were 

 Shags, of which a few breed on the Bass at the present day, 

 and that the " scoutes " were Guillemots, names which 

 Brereton would have obtained at Dunbar. 



19. William Harvey, the celebrated discoverer of the 

 circulation of the blood, has a foremost place among the 

 historians of the Bass, for in the " Exercitationes de 

 Generatione Animalium " (1651) — said to have been the 

 last of his works — he gives a somewhat lengthy account of 

 the Bass Rock, from a personal visit to it in 1641, when he 

 accompanied Charles I. to Scotland, but it may be that he 

 only sailed round it without being able to land. He says: — 



* Mr. C. J. Romanes informs me that in the beginning of the 

 seventeenth century the pound Scots was worth about one-twelfth of 

 an EngUsh pound, but Mr. Hume Brown thinks there can be no doubt 

 tliat Brereton is referring to English money. On the other hand the 

 prices previously quoted from the Household Books of James IV. and 

 James V. (see p. 177) are in Scotch money. Mr. J. Anderson says that 

 in their reigns — 1488-1542 — Scots money was to English not 1 to 12, 

 but 1 to 4 : thus twenty shillings Scots was equal to five shillings 

 English. 



