Lying out of the ordinary track of boats, even of yachts, it is, even now, seldom visited, and in the last century no one except the steward of Macleod (whose family have been the possessors of St. Kilda for hundreds of years), who made an annual pilgrimage to collect the rent, ever came near the place. Its loneliness was proverbial, so much so that it was an article of faith that the arrival of strangers brought with them a kind of influenza called boat-cough, which was sometimes fatal. This singular disease does not seem to be confined to St. Kilda, for Bates, in ‘The Naturalist on the River Amazon,’ mentions certain tribes near Ega who are gradually becoming extinct from a slow fever and cold, which attacks them after they have been visited by civilised people. And in the ‘Cruise of H.M.S. Galatea,’ in 1867-68, it says, ‘Tristran d’Acunha is a remarkably healthy island; but it is a singular fact that any vessel touching there from St. Helena invariably brings with it a disease resembling influenza.’ This belief is amusingly illustrated in Boswell’s ‘Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides.’ ‘This evening he (Dr. Johnson) disputed the truth of what is said as to the people of St. Kilda catching cold whenever strangers come. “How can there,” said he, “be a physical effect without a physical cause?” He added, laughing, “The arrival of a ship full of strangers would kill them; for, if one stranger gives them one cold, two strangers must give them two colds, and so on in proportion.” I wondered to hear him ridicule this, as he had praised McAulay for putting it in his book,[2] saying that it was manly in him to tell a fact, however strange, if he himself believed it. They said it was annually proved by Macleod’s steward, on whose arrival all the inhabitants caught cold. He jocularly remarked, “The steward always comes to demand something from them, and so they fall a-coughing. I suppose the people in Skye all take a cold when----” (naming a certain person) “comes.” They said he only came in summer. _Johnson_--“That is out of tenderness to you. Bad weather and he at the same time would be too much.”’ The first printed account of this poor lonely island is, probably, in a little book by Donald Monro, High Dean of the Isles,[3] 1594. He there says, ‘The inhabitants therof ar simple poor people, scarce learnit in aney religion, but McCloyd of Herray,[4] his stewart, or he quhom he deputs in sic office, sailes anes in the zeir ther at midsummer, with some chaplaine to baptize bairns ther, and if they want[5] a chaplaine, they baptize their bairns themselfes.’