"The works both of Douglas and Wood were for their time admirable examples of ability and research. The former author, himself a member of an ancient Scottish house, was in a position which made it easy for him to collect information from the members of the Scottish nobility, and many of their charter-chests were opened to him. But he and his editor, Wood, laborious and painstaking though they were, lived at a period when the historical records of the country were very much less accessible than they now are. With the exception of the Acts of Parliament in an abridged and mutilated form, absolutely nothing in the way of records had in Douglas' days been printed, and references and authorities had to be patiently sought with much expenditure of time and trouble in the badly arranged, insufficiently housed, and wholly unindexed public documents. The natural consequence was that while their information, so far as it dealt with their own times or the generation immediately preceding, was on the whole commendably accurate, the particulars regarding the earlier centuries were scanty and too frequently untrustworthy."〔

"It was fortunate that a work of this magnitude was completed on the eve of the First World War. It effectively replaced all former Scottish peerage reference works and, on the whole, was comprehensive and accurate in the information it contained. Unlike ''The Complete Peerage'' it was not limited to successors to titles of honour and their immediate heirs. Amateurs of quaint and curious footnotes are likely to be disappointed. ''The Scots Peerage'', as Paul acknowledged, was not his work alone—he received much assistance from a well-chosen body of able and learned persons—but there can be no doubt that he inspired the work and deserves most of the credit for it."