Ohituary Notices, 
IX 
years. Mr Skene gave much time to this work, and wrote 
valuable reports describing the operations of the Committee. In 
the education of the people he was deeply interested. He served 
for a couple of years on the School Board of Edinburgh, devoting 
special attention to that branch of the Board’s work which was 
directed to the education of destitute and neglected children. 
For many years he taught a Bible class on Sabbath, for which 
full notes were carefully prepared. Some of these he afterwards 
wrote out in connected form, and published under the title of 
The Gospel History for the Young. A member of the Episcopal 
Church, Mr Skene was connected with St Vincent’s congregation, of 
which he was for many years the main prop and stay. St Vincent’s 
belonged to what was called the English Episcopal Church in 
Scotland; but, mainly through the influence of Mr Skene, the 
congregation became united some years ago to the Scottish 
Episcopal Church. 
A man of many gifts and graces — an accomplished linguist ; a 
well-equipped theologian, specially conversant with the develop- 
ment of doctrine and ritual ; a proficient in music ; a good talker, 
with a fund of anecdote, and not destitute of humour — Mr Skene 
was known among his friends. In literature he will be remem- 
bered as the most profound student of this century of the history 
and institutions of the early inhabitants of Scotland. Capable 
men toiled in the same field before Mr Skene’s day. Hot to 
go further back than last century, there were the able, if preju- 
diced Pinkerton, the dispassionate Innes, the erudite Chalmers. 
Within the last fifty years, valuable additions to our stock of 
knowledge in one department or another of the subject have 
been made by such men as John Stuart, Joseph Eobertson, Bishop 
Forbes, Dr M‘Lauchlan, Sir Daniel Wilson, Dr Reeves, Dr Joseph 
Anderson, and others. Mr Skene entered into the labours of 
these and such men. All that was worth reading, and much 
that was not, of what predecessors and contemporaries wrote, he 
knew thoroughly. 
His own work combined that of the pioneer and the settler. 
He explored the ground and tilled it. Mr Skene was fully 
alive to the supreme importance of the evidence supplied by 
the concrete facts of anthropology and archseology, where such 
