The Ordination of Elders in a Scottish Kirk, painting by John Henry Lorimer, 1891Alexander Webster, minister of the Tolbooth Kirk in St. Giles, Edinburgh and moderator of the Church of Scotland in 1753, was responsible for providing the first reliable estimate of Scotland's population in modern times. Based on returns from parish ministers, mostly for the year 1755, he calculated Scotland's population at 1,265,380. His census did not, however, include most of the country's small Roman Catholic minority, figures for which relied on ministers reporting the number of "papists" in their parishes. Internal evidence suggests that this was done inconsistently.
