Transactions. 55 



English colonies to Scottish enterprise had a powerful effect in 

 giving an impulse to agriculture, by enabling some of the more 

 enterprising landholders to plant and otherwise improve their 

 properties, and give liberal terms to their tenants. Even before 

 the Revolution attempts at enclosure had been made in Galloway 

 and Nithsdale, but they had been met by tlie peasantry with 

 determined resistance. Rights or customs of commonage had 

 perhaps grown up in this Celto-Pictish and always unruly 

 province, and the operations seem to have been carried out with 

 harshness and precipitancy, and to have been preceded by the 

 ejection, Irish fashion, of several crofters. 



Few people at the present day have any idea how very 

 recent the general prosperity and improved appearance of 

 the country really is. The population of Scotland in the 

 beginning of last century numbered about 900,000, and was 

 roughly but fairly well fed and clad ; but their surroundings, 

 their habitations, and the aspect of the country on every 

 side were most miserable. Even so late as 1750 the build- 

 ings in the smaller towns and villages, and the farmhouses, were 

 mere hovels, with a but and a ben, built of clay, and thatched 

 with rushes, coarse grass, and heather ; great tracts of now fertile 

 land, even in the river valleys, stood barren and treeless ; every 

 man by himself, or with the assistance of his neighbours, building 

 his own hut, as his ancestors had done for hundreds of years before 

 him. By and bye we shall see how meanly, as a rule, not only the 

 lower, but even the middling classes lived, and how poorly they 

 were clad, compared with the present day. So late as 1794, flesh 

 meat, which was a drug in the Middle Ages, had become, over the 

 greater part of the country, a rarity on the tables of all but the 

 richest people, and the bulk of the nation had become practically 

 vegetarian. Green crops and stall-feeding, we learn from a con- 

 temporary account, were unknown before 1760; there were no 

 artificial grasses, not a blade of wheat grew beyond the Lowlands, 

 and not much there. Three or four returns was considered a 

 good grain crop, which was mostly carried to market on pack 

 horses, and even by the crofter's family, who also frequently 

 carried out on their backs the spare supply of manure applied to 

 the land. At the same time, there was nowhere such penury and 

 privation as now exist in the slums of the great towns, wlien 

 Scotland has become the wealthiest country in the world. The 



