Volume 3 - Electric Scotland

190 ST. KILDA.
to make us believe. In 1773, according- to Buclian,
there were thirty families ; yet Macaulay, not ten years
after that, states them at less than they are now, or under
half the number in Martin's day, without thinking it
worth his while to enquire into the reason. He is proba-
bly as correct in this as he is about tlie height of Cono-
chan. How should any thing good ever come from one
who has Mac for a prefix to his Boeotian name. We
might as well look for a treatise on Metaphysics from the
Little Weasel and the Great Beaver, or for grace from the
collision of Captain Wattle and Miss Row. I hope you
do not suspect me of such a pronomen. I found exactly
103 individuals, distributed among twenty families; at
present there are 110. We were informed that a native
rarely left the island ;
and the natural question therefore
was, why, with such means of living, they did not in-
crease; since that increase takes place in a rapid and
distressing degree in all the neighbouring islands. That
they might here increase with impunity, is evident from
the statement I have already given. The inhabitants
accuse the small pox as the cause of this check in former
days ; and it also appears that, from mismanagement of
some kind, they lose an unusual proportion of children.
Politically speaking', this is a piece of good fortune;
but it would have discomfited the plans of the philo-
sophic Lewis XIV, who, with a view of increasing his
French people, thought fit, most sapiently, to offer a
reward for the production of ten children ; on the same
])rinciple, doubtless, as he would have attempted to pro-
duce good musket practice by ordering his men to fire
at the bull's eye.
All the world has heard of St. Kilda music and St. Kilda
poetry, just as all the world has heard of the musical and
poetical genius of the Highlanders, of this land of poetry,
and spirit of poetry, and poetic imagination, and what not.