Page:The library a magazine of bibliography and library literature, Volume 6.djvu/146

 i^4 The L ib vary. salaries ; (3) By showing the importance to the country of the agricultural statistics given in that publication, Sir John was enabled to prevail on the Government to establish the Board of Agriculture. A general view of the scope of the work may, perhaps, be best obtained by looking somewhat carefully into the report of one parish. For that purpose I select the parish of Thurso, in Caithness, seeing it was the one written by Sir John himself. He, first of all, supplies an excellent map of the parish ; he then gives a general introduction, which is followed by the several chapters, sixteen in number ; then a conclusion, followed by five appendices. The sixteen chapters and the conclusion are further subdivided into sections, amounting in all to seventy-six. This surely shows a minuteness of detail and a comprehensiveness which would render the omission of anything of any importance whatever almost an impossibility. The subjects of the sixteen chapters are as follows: I. Preliminary Observations; II. History and State of the Town; III. Constitution and Government; IV. Population; V. Ecclesiastical State ; VI. Charitable Funds and Institutions; VII. Education; VIII. Revenue Department ; IX. Military and Naval Department ; X. Manufactures and Trade; XL Fisheries; XII. Police and Supply ; XIII. Manners and Customs; XIV. Arts and Sciences; XV. Miscellaneous Observations; XVI. Country part of the Parish. The informa- tion given under these several headings is not only valuable and interesting, it is, also, sometimes curious. Thus, under Longevity, a section of Population, we are told of a man then alive and active in the parish at the age of 105 ; under Post-office we are informed that the salary of the postman and his runners was ^"47 per annum, and that Thurso had only four posts in the week : under Fisheries, salmon fishing, we have narrated a catch of 2,560 salmon at one haul, in the Thurso, in the year 1748; under Eminent Men, mention is made of one such individual ; and the section, Natural History, must have been inserted on the Snakes- in-Iceland principle, as all that the section tells is that " Nothing remarkable occurs in this department." The New Statistical Account of Scotland, published under the direction of a committee of the Society for the Sons and Daughters of the Clergy of the Church of Scotland fifty years after the publication of the account we have just been describing, differed from it, not only in a great part of the matter, for you know statistics are notoriously changeable and changing, but particu-