Still much occasion for inquiry remained after all the use that could be made of reports, registers, and books. Much of what related to the institutions of Religion, education, and the poor, might be supposed to come readily to hand, the clergy themselves being most conversant with such matters. But they appear to have charged themselves with the toil of very different investigations. Some have been at the pains to ascertain the amount and occupations of the population, betwixt the decennial terms of the parliamentary census. Few have omitted to state, in connexion with the agriculture of the parish, the quantities of land under tillage or under wood, in pasture or in moor, and the amount respectively of the different kinds of produce--facts that imply not a little correspondence with land-owners and land-occupiers, and much industry in the collation of returns. They have had recourse, frequently, to mineralogists, botanists, overseers of mining and manufacturing works, whose contributions are of as much value as the fullest and ripest knowledge can give. Picture-galleries are sometimes described by their owners; family papers occasionally disclose facts of some interest in the history of the country. Throughout the work there are signs not to be mistaken, of much private and unwonted inquiry on the part of the reverend authors, to do, in a creditable way, a work that, from the nature of it, ought to have been apportioned to at least two different parties. The defects which remain only suggest to us the hope which was thus expressed in similar circumstances, that "the circulation of this work, by bringing the deficiencies in the means of statistical information under the public view, and drawing attention to them, may, in this respect, also contribute to the advancement of the science." It is implied, of course, that the work, to be useful in this indirect way, must have merits of another kind. On these the _New Statistical Account_ may stand. No other book affords the same insight into the various natural resources of the country; none describes so well, and so skilfully, the most considerable branches of industry, and the methods of conducting them; none has brought together the same variety of statistics, with the same ample means of speculating upon their mutual relations. It is still more remarkable, that such a work, embracing, as it does, so much beyond the usual sphere of their observation, should proceed from the clergy; but the explanation is, that the position and character of that body open to them the best means of information on many subjects with which they are themselves not at all conversant. They have produced here a work, which, as a collection of parochial statistics, stands alone, without either rival or resemblance in any other country, representing the state of Scotland, at the period to which it refers, in all its aspects, and so affording the means of a definite comparison between the past and the present, such as, in