Ossian Collection > Journal of a tour in Scotland in

8 JOURNAL OF A TOUR IN SCOTLAND
in fourteen. But in the country, where
patients were so numerous that they were
placed out in the fields (like the sick in
some of my South American tribes) by the
side of a brook or ditch, in an open shed,
with a little hurdle -work over them, and
a mess of gruel or some such thing, beside,
to eat or leave as they liked, the mortality
was only one in seventy, so much worse is
the best ventilated hospital than the open
air. I repeated this next day to Dr Hope,
and he then told me in confirmation of the
conclusion which Dr Rennie had inferred,
that the wounded both at Talavera and
Salamanca who were left all night upon the
field recovered in much greater proportion
than those who had been housed, and this
he ascribed to the effect of the free air in
preventing or allaying fever.
When Mr JoUie was a boy it was the
common belief that if you put a straw in
the keyhole of Sir George Mackenzie's tomb-
chamber and said three times "Bloody
Mackenzie, your soul's in hell ! " the door
would open of itself. The people of Edin-
burgh are beginning to have a taste for
ornamented churches. The new kirk in
Charlotte Square has a dome of some pre-