Johnson’s “Tour of the Hebrides'' is two things. It is an entertaining account of his travels with Boswell to the Near Abroad that begins in Edinburgh, which Johnson thinks will be a familiar enough city to his readers so that it need not be described, and works its way to the remote islands off the northwest coast of Scotland, and then back again, revealing things about the places and the peoples that might seem a bit strange to his London readers. Second of all, in this mild guise, Johnson presents what is an analysis of the social structural differences between a backward place and a modern, affluent place, as Britain is, and how one can become the other. This is the self same project that was taken on by the Nineteenth Century sociologists who also wanted to explain how the modern world differed from the feudal or other pre-modern worlds, and so I think it would be correct to treat Johnson as one of the founders of sociology even if he is not given credit for being so because he is a literary man and so his most incisive social structural observations are not particularly abstracted as such, even as other contemporary proto-sociologists such as Thomas Malthus, are given their due because he originates of formulas to describe the whole of social life something sociologists never following up on this promise while economists have tried, however fruitless they are at making predictions. Moreover, Johnson makes his comparison between two societies that are very similar to one another. The two share an island, a language, a Protestant religion, even if Johnson says early on that Scotland has abandoned the more rigorous forms of Calvinism which had earlier inflamed it, as well as having been a single nation, at least officially, for some fifty years. His book is, therefore, much like Young’s “Travels in France'' where Young, some fifteen years later, will treat travel to the land across the Channel as something of a voyage of discovery, finding the natives to be somewhat backward by English standards, neither their farms nor roads up to his standards.