But it is unnecessary to insist further upon such problematical evidence in regard to the probable extent and prevalence of the disease in Scotland. A proof of this, of a much stronger character, is afforded by the simple fact that, as late as the reign of James I. the victims of the disease were made the subject of a direct and special legislative enactment in the Scottish Parliament held at Perth in the year 1427. I shall quote one short clause from this act “anent Lipper Folke”[46] (as it is termed), to illustrate both the apparent prevalence of the malady at that time, and this circumstance, that the burghs of the kingdom are then spoken of as possessing, or obliged to possess, lazar-houses of their own. The second clause is to the following effect: “Item, that na Lipper Folke sit to thig (beg) neither in kirk nor kirkzaird, nor other place within the burrowes, but at their own hospital, and at the port of the towne and other places outwith the burrowes.” It is impossible to form any approach as to the number affected in this country. The hospitals that I have enumerated do not seem calculated to contain many patients. As we have already seen, that of Ayr contained at least eight patients; Rothfan, seven; five were admitted into the Greenside hospital at its first opening in 1591; and in a report of the Glasgow hospital, submitted to the magistrates in 1589, six lepers were reported as then belonging to that institution. These data are entirely inadequate to draw any conclusion from, and the more so, that here, as in England, the disease was probably more extensively spread during the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries than afterwards; and it is exactly at that remote period that all our Scottish records are most defective.