He attended King William's College, near to which the family moved when Quine was twelve years old, when they settled in Ballasalla.

[1] After winning numerous prizes at the school, Quine won an open scholarship to study Mathematics at Merton College, Oxford, in 1877.

[2] His enjoyment of Oxford was hampered only by the occasional consequences of his quick tongue and a lack of funds that he attributed to his father's miserliness.

[1] Upon graduation it was expected that he would go on to a successful career in the Church or the British Museum, but instead he returned to the Isle of Man, being by this time a staunch Manx Nationalist.

[1] In 1884 Quine married Mary Lindsay, the sister of the Bishop's Chaplain, who was described at the time as being a lady of great dignity and beauty.

It was written in the Anglo-Manx dialect and it features a number of Manx types, including smugglers, farmers and maids.

"[7] Reports of one of his presentations to the IOMNHAS in 1917 states:[8] [Quine] claimed that the Cronks, hitherto believed to have been burial places or fortifications; were really artificial mounds used by the Roman engineers to assist in the triangulation and plotting out of lands; they were found at regular distances of Roman miles in proper alignment, and the connecting lines formed regular parallelograms and triangles when tested on the Ordnance Map.

He regarded certain Manx place-names as corruptions of old Latin designations derived from Roman emperors, goddesses and heroes.

His other notable theories included the idea that Phoenician mariner merchants visited the island, and that Saint Patrick was born on the Isle of Man.

[4] However, Mona Douglas was to later praise his skill in Manx archaeology and its early documents, writing that "there is hardly a branch of these subjects on which he has not written papers of profound scholarship and original thought.

In contrast to his scanty knowledge of Manx Gaelic, Quine was fluent in French – it was in this language that he kept detailed diaries.

[1] He remained a good friend with Archibald Knox throughout his life, commissioning works by him for his church in Lonan, including the war memorial and some silverware.