The fishing business here engrosses the whole attention of the men. To this they constantly resort in all seasons and weathers, in small light skiffs which they get from Norway. These boats go out about noon, and do not return until three, and sometimes six o’clock the following day. During that time they often go twelve leagues from land. The yearly export of fish to foreign markets, particularly those of Spain and Italy, amounts to several hundred tons. Agriculture, in the Shetland Isles, is at a very low ebb. The land being in general very barren, rocky, and chiefly depending on the tillage of the women, yields but scanty produce. The labour, in the lesser isles, is performed by digging over the soil like a garden. Their spade is narrow, like that used in cutting peats, and not at all similar to that with which they dig in Britain and Ireland. After the seed is sown, (which they do in a very awkward manner, going backwards as if sowing onion seeds,) the women drag a kind of harrow, made _wholly_ of wood, over it, taking hold of a straw rope fastened to the harrow, and passing over their shoulders. This I have seen them do, at the same time that the men were lying beside them looking on. In Mainland, where the farms are more level and extensive, they make use of a sort of plough, such as was common in times of remote antiquity, and which a man may carry to any distance in one hand. The ploughman walks by the side of the plough, which he directs by a small handle fixed on the top of it. The driver (if so he may be called) goes before the oxen, and pulls them on by a rope tied round their horns; and some with spades follow, to level the furrow and break the clods. Such seed as I saw, was not so good as that called drawings, or small corn, in Britain, and was also chaffy, and seemingly of a bad species. From the appearance of a stubble, it was evident that their crops were neither luxuriant nor prolific. So prevalent is their rage for fishing, that the only land used in husbandry is that along the sea coast, which bears no proportion to that lying waste and uncultivated. In some places where the soil is fertile, the crops are early, especially where the substratum is limestone; but the seasons are so various, that it is impossible to state the precise time of harvest. The grain crop consists of a small kind of black or grey oats, and a species of barley, commonly called bear or big. The oatmeal has a bitter burnt taste. The potatoes, however, are tolerably good. Very little time is, in general, devoted to gathering of manure. Sometimes they make use of sea-weed either by itself, or made into small dunghills with cow-dung or earth. Notwithstanding that they have abundance of limestone and peats, they seldom use lime as a manure, owing to which neglect, and the want of fallowing, they have frequently a plentiful crop of weeds.