SCOTlvAND IN THE ^IGHTEEJNTH CENTURY I9 



sackcloth at the church door on Sundays, rather 

 than enforce the rigid Scotch laws. This disgrace 

 was often mitigated or even avoided by the pay- 

 ment of money to the church treasurer.* Sometimes 

 several of a young man's friends would stand 

 around him, and since the public might not know 

 which was the guilty one in the group the penance 

 was thus turned into a frolic. Birt informs us also 

 that, *'When a woman has undergone the penance, 

 with an appearance of repentance she has wiped off 

 the scandal among all the Godly."t In the midst 

 of these conditions Alexander Wilson grew up, and 

 in contending against them in part, and sometimes 

 in yielding to them, too, his character was formed. 

 It is this remarkable character of his that is the ex- 

 planation both of his achievements in science and 

 of his literary work. For this reason a very care- 

 ful study of the era in which he lived and the people 

 who surrounded him, and of whom he was one, is 

 necessary before we consider the man himself and 

 what he accomplished. The loose customs of the 

 day, its immorality and intemperance, played a 

 great part in the lives of Robert Fergusson and 

 Burns, and the young poet of Paisley, Robert Tan- 

 nahill, also, and though the habits of immorality 

 were more to be noticed in Wilson *'in the breach 

 than the observance," yet their influence upon him 

 helped to make him the man that he was. Captain 

 Topham was scandalized by the custom which ex- 

 isted of indiscriminate kissing between young women 



* "IvCtters from a Gentleman in North of Scotland," by Captain 

 Edward Birt, 1759, I, p. 234. 

 t Ibid., p. 123. 



