12 OCTOBER 1912, Page 3

We regret to have to record the death in his

seventy-seventh year of Professor W. W. Skeat, who for the last thirty-four years had held the Professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge. Graduating in mathematics, Professor Skeat soon turned his attention to philology, and the record of his publications since the year 1864 is an astonishing witness to his industry and enthusiasm. To the public at large he was best known by his admirable Etymological Dictionary and his advocacy of the cause of simplified spelling. Scholars and antiquaries will hold him in grateful remembrance for his editions of Chaucer, Piers Plowman, and Chatterton, for his glossaries and studies of place-names, and for the work he did in founding and pro- moting the English Dialect Society.