Volume 3 - Electric Scotland

220 AGRICOLTURE.
thousand situations ; and I have elsewhere remarked
how the state of Canna and St. Kilda point out the ad-
vantages that might be derived from imitating- these
natural processes. If labour were to be hired, or if the
tenant, who must here be his own labourer, were fully
occupied, there would be some excuse for such neglect.
At present there is seldom any ; because, during a large
part of the year, he is unemployed, and, consequently,
idle. The hay of the Highlands is most commonly the
produce of natural meadows; but a much larger part
is obtained from road-sides and waste scraps of land.
The former, and indeed the latter also, is generally coarse
in itself, and further contaminated by rushes and other
aquatic plants; so that no horse who has not been edu-
cated on it, or starved into compliance, will eat it. At
the same time, it is saved at a great expense of time and
labour; while, being as late a crop as the corn, both
harvests are often going on at the same time, and the bay
is rarely stacked without much damage from the rains,
by which indeed it is sometimes utterly destroyed.
One of the most remarkable and wasteful features
of the ancient system of Highland farming, was the ex-
traordinary number of horses kept for real or imaginary
purposes. It is now fast expiring, and must idtimately
terminate entirely ; but it may still be found. It is not
long ago since Tirey contained fifteen hundred ; a num-
ber probably ten times greater than its actual wants, as
the rearing of horses, either here or elsewhere, for a
market, was never a part of the system of rural economy.
When I was last in Sky, improved as that island has re-
cently been, I found forty upon one joint farm, where the
whole labour might easily have been performed by six. In
a parish of Sutherland there were, not long ago, twenty
ploughs, implying the same number of horses, where two
might have performed the whole work with ease.