Ohituary Notices. 
XV 
are of a two-fold character. There is first of all the collecting, sift- 
ing, and arranging of the raw materials for such a history ; and there 
is besides the stately pile which he himself constructed out of these 
materials. In addition to the papers already spoken of, contributed 
to the Transactions of the Iona Club and the Proceedings of the 
Society of Antiguaries, falls to be mentioned a translation, with 
introduction, notes, and illustrations, of John of Fordun’s 
Chronicle of the Scottish Nation, a work which forms vols. i. and iv. 
of the Historians of Scotland series. Vol. vi. of the same series is 
an adaptation of Dr Reeves’s great work, Adamnan^s Life of St 
Columha. In the Scottish edition of this monumental book a trans- 
lation of Adamnan’s Latin text by the late Bishop of Brechin is 
given, while Dr Reeves’s learned and exhaustive notes are con- 
densed and recast by Mr Skene. The most important contribu- 
tion of this description to Scottish history made by Skene is 
the large volume known as the Chronicles of the Piets and Scots, 
edited by him, and published under the direction of the Lord Clerk- 
Register of Scotland in 1867, In addition to the Chronicle of the 
Piets and the Chronicle of the Scots, there are here gathered together 
“ as complete a collection as possible of the fragments which still 
remain of the Early Chronicles and. Memorials of Scotland, prior 
to the publication of Fordun’s History. The extracts written in 
Saxon, Welsh, and Gaelic are accompanied by a translation ; those 
written in Latin are left untranslated. In all, fifty-eight documents, 
in whole or in part, are printed, with a preface extending to nearly 
200 pages of large octavo, giving a description and examination of 
the documents. “The first piece, both in point of time and of 
importance, is that usually known by the name of the Pictish 
Chronicle.’’^ It is in three parts, and Mr Skene is of opinion that 
the second and third divisions have been translated from an old 
Gaelic original by a scholar who did not always understand his 
text. A Gaelic word or phrase is occasionally left untranslated, e.g., 
“ Athelstan filius Advar rig Saxanf — rig Saxan being Gaelic for 
“King of the Saxons.” The editor concludes that the Chronicle 
proper was written originally in Gaelic at Brechin between the 
years 977 and 995. 
Mr Skene’s reputation as an historian will rest on his chef- 
T oeuvre, Celtic Scotland. This important work, the outcome of 
VOL. XX. 2 N 
