102 
A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF 
[BUCHANAN 
tion, which he gathered partly by good information and partly 
by his own observations, he having been their first settled 
Minister and lived amongst them twenty-four years, till his 
death ... he was sent by the Kev. Commission of the Church 
of Scotland to be Minister at St. Kilda in the year 1705, as 
appears by their pendant or written acts, which he had along 
with him. . . . He died about the beginning of the year 
1730 of an high fever. . . .” 
1752. A | Description | of | St. Kilda ; | Giving an Account of its | 
Situation, | Extent, | Soil, | Product, | Bays, | Rocks, | Adjacent 
Islands, | Ancient Laws and Government, | Religion, | Customs 
and late Reformation, | By the Rev. Mr. Alexander Buchan | 
late Minister there. | Printed in the Year, m,dcc,lii. 
Collation — 1 vol. 12mo, pp. 2 un. + pp. 46. 
Idem. 2nd edit, of above. m,dcclxxiii. 
Collation — 1 vol. 8vo, pp. iv + pp. 70. 
(No place of imprint in either edition.) Contains a considerable 
account of the birds of the Island, principally derived from 
Martin’s Voyage to St. Kilda, 1698. 
Buchanan (John Lane), 1 ^. ca. 1730-1816 
Buchanan was a native of Menteith, Perthshire, and was 
educated at the Grammar School of Callander and Glasgow 
University. For some years he was assistant to Bobert 
Menzies, minister of Comrie, and on the latter’s death in 
1780 he went as missionary to the Western Isles. He after- 
wards resided in London. 
The undermentioned work is said to have been written 
from Buchanan’s notes by Dr. William Thomson (nat. 
Forteviot, Perthshire, 1746, ob. Kensington, March 16, 1817), 
“ an ingenious, versatile and multifarious writer ” (cf. 
Chambers’s Lives of Eminent Scotsmen , vol. iv. p. 353). 
For a reference to Thomson’s “ abuse of his editorship,” 
cf. Notes and Queries , Ser. ii. vol. x. p. 402. 
To Buchanan we are indebted for the statement that 
“ The Gare Fowl is four feet long, and supposed to be the 
pigeon of South America” (p. 131). 
1 John Lanne in D.N.B., also N. and Q., ii. x. p. 412. 
