xviii Proceedings of Royal Society of Edinhurgh. 
Whitby, Colman of Lindisfarne upheld the authority of St John and 
St Columba as equal to that of St Peter and the Pope. Mr Skene 
shows clearly that the early Gaelic Church was not Presbyterian, 
Episcopal, or Eoinan, as we understand these terms nowadays. 
It had at least two distinguishing and praiseworthy features : it 
combined great missionary zeal with literary enthusiasm. Several 
ideas and practices, among them its intense monasticism and the 
passion for an eremitic life, the old Gaelic Church, by ways and 
channels which we do not as yet fully know, borrowed from the 
East. Its most peculiar feature was the manner in which the 
tribal organisation of the Gael was adapted to the government and 
discipline of the monastery. The headship of the tribe or clan was 
as to family hereditary ; but, in theory at least, elective as to the 
individual. In Iona the bishop, though often spoken of, was a 
subordinate person ; the abbot was all and in all. The abbot of 
the monastery was, like the head of the clan, selected out of the 
family of the person who founded the monastery. This peculiar 
arrangement took root and prospered among the Gael. The idea 
was native, and very probably it helped to make the Gaelic Church 
so intensely national, or, more properly speaking, racial. By the 
beginning of the thirteenth century the Columban Church was 
externally extinct in Scotland. It is to be regretted that the limit 
which Mr Skene had imposed upon himself precluded him from 
inquiring to what extent, if any, the old ideas and ways survived 
under the Roman organisation that displaced them. A chapter 
from his pen on the Highland Church from the thirteenth to the 
sixteenth century would be a valuable contribution to the ecclesi- 
astical history of Scotland. 
The civil and political history of Scotland in early times is 
written by Skene with a fulness hitherto unattempted. The 
portion of Scotland conquered by the Romans was held but for a 
limited period, and upon a precarious tenure. After the with- 
drawal of the legions the thick darkness that followed is broken by 
the landing in Argyleshire of a colony of Irish Gaels in 503. 
During the next 350 years four peoples struggle for the mastery on 
Scottish soil — the Gael of Dalriada, the Britons of Strathclyde, the 
Saxons of the south-east, and the Piets, wRo lived beyond the 
Forth, and, according to Skene, in Galloway. Eventually these race^ 
