the angry Greek, missing its aim, was buried, as to its point, in the pebbly earth. Somewhere here the hapless Lycaon knelt on the sandy shore, and in one of the most touching petitions of the Iliad, prayed the inexorable demi-God for sweet life. What vision of poet must that have been in which he saw Hecuba, frantic with deadly fear, offer her forgotten breast to her doomed son, and bewail, with that most pitiful woman's wail of the centuries gone by, the death she already saw gathering over her son, her own, her hope and that of Troy. Here was run that triple course round the walls of which the prize was "the soul of the divine Hector." No deus ex machinâ is needed to make the heart-broken venture of old Priam into the camp of the Achæans an episode of unsurpassed interest. Like the wounded Hector and the ruthless Achilles, he passes the ford which lay between the fleet and city. The Gods may fly from Olympus to Ida, and Iris may cross the Euxine and fly thence back to Ethiopia in a breath, but Homeric mortals toil on the plains of Troy and measure and re-measure this very Scamander with weary or flying feet. There is no mistaking the Homeric topography, and besides the Hellespont and river, the smoking fountains and the Simoïs tumbling in on the other side, there is Batiia, the hill before the city; the Pergamus above it, and the very ground, such as Homer describes it, where the heroes ran the triple course round the city, and the ford between the camp and the city.

Schliemann finding Priam's treasure, therefore, is an archæological joke; but finding Homer's Troy was not only doing a possible thing, but one very likely to have been done; and in the opinion of most archæologists the only reason for his not having accomplished it, is that it has already and long ago been discovered, at Bounarbashi. Schliemann himself recognized this at first, and went there to try, but found nothing, as was to be expected since if " Troy was," it must have been so long ago that nothing but the solid stone walls which Hahn and Mauduit uncovered years ago at Bounarbashi would have resisted decomposition, unless protected by something more than ashes and accumulation of ruin. There was nothing on the site, which is a rocky hill-top, but what has probably been ravaged, from cupidity or reverence, many years ago. Whether it was Troy or not, it is indisputable that the author of the Iliad took it to be so; and if so his contemporaries; and with the whole Hellenic world ringing with the glory of that great feat of their ancestors, it is not likely that as late as the time of Alexander, or even of Herodotus, there was a tile or movable fragment which antique grace or recent fraud could invest with the value of a relic which would not have been carried away by the pilgrims; for human nature was, three to four thousand years ago, pretty much what it is now; and just across the river was the new city Ilium, whose inhabitants, probably curious and intelligent Ionians, most likely passed much of their holidays as we do, scratching about for keepsakes of famous people and places. It would be curious indeed if a fragment of pottery had remained for this inquisitive German in the only place where he looked, viz, on the Acropolis,

So he went to Hissarlik, where are the ruins of a comparatively modern city, New Troy. The very name New Troy shows that it was not believed in ancient times to be on the same site as Old Troy. Here Schliemann dug however, sensibly enough, and safely enough, for there are few old sites in the Levant where some results of excavations might not be obtained. Very few of the celebrated antique sites have ever been systematically excavated. Mycænæ, Argos, Gnossus, Gortyna, Polyrrhenia, Aptera, Kisamon, and many other well-known cities lie buried, with here and there a fragment protruding, like a finger beckoning from the grave. What has been found by excavation is probably not the hundredth part of what will be found when archæology pays.

Schliemann was deficient in two important qualifications for his quest --he had no archæological judgment, and a very incomplete understanding of Homer. He had, however, what most real archeologists have not -money; and he was able to pay for digging, which is an important point in archæological research. He decided that the Hissarlik site must be that of Troy, for the following reasons:-He found no remains anywhere else, which, as I have pointed out, is no reason under the circumstances; the tumuli called (by modern tradition) after Hector and Priam have been opened and nothing found in them, which is simply evidence of their great antiquity; the fact that they were tumuli is more important than that nothing was found in them, for the existence of tumuli proves a city; the citadel at Bounarbashi is too abrupt for the race of Hector and Achilles, and the remains of the ancient edifice on the top too small to have belonged to so important a city as Ilion; an argument which will recommend itself only as based on Schliemann's acceptation of the Homeric text. The distance from Sigaum (!) is nearly ten miles to the Bounarbashi site, while it is only three to that of Hissarlik; from which Schliemann concludes either that Homer exaggerated the pedestrian powers of his heroes as much as their muscular, or else Hissarlik was Troy; a curious sample of his method of misstating his facts, and drawing his conclusion from his misstatements. The Greek camp having been, as we saw, not at Sigæum, which is on the open Aegean, and the west side of the Scamander, but on the Hellespont, and east of the Scamander, there would be no river between it and Hissarlik, so the Doctor moves the camp over to Sigæum, in order to be able to cross the river so as to get at Troy! It seems useless to discuss the Homeric conditions under such obliquity of vision, and we had better leave Schliemann his convictions, confident that no one will care to dispute the priority with him. The reasons why Hissarlik cannot have been the site of the Homeric Troy are, as we have seen, as numerous as the topographical indications given by Homer; but a correspondent of the Aca demy, Mr. Huyshe, has given one mathematically conclusive-viz. that, calculating the recession of the shores of the Hellespont since the date assigned to the siege, the Greek camp must have been under the walls of the city, if it stood on the hill of Hissarlik.

But the Doctor's discoveries raise another question-the important one of our inquest-did Homer know where Troy was, and did he not, almost as much in the dark as we, take the Pelasgic ruin at Bounarbashi for the lost site? The reply to this involves several considerations. In the genealogical dispute between Achilles and Æneas (Book xx.), the latter repeats what seems to be the earliest tradition of Troy, that before that city was built the people of his race dwelt on the slopes of Ida. Troy was, then, the first city in the Troad, and if Homer had no definite information on the subject, he was justified in supposing the oldest ruin to be that of Ilion, the sacred, built by the Gods. At his day there was little chance of confounding the more recent city at Hissarlik with the Pelasgic city, and the words put into the mouth of Eneas furnish another argument, if more were needed, against Hissarlik; for Schliemann finds under his Troy a more ancient and yet more civilised city, which is thus seen to be absolutely inconsistent with the Homeric hypothesis.

Again, Homer describes, in terms not to be mistaken, the position of a tumulus of great size on the shores of the Hellespont as that raised over the ashes of Patroclus and Achilles. The tumulus still exists, and must have been raised for some important commemorative use, and if any such were due to an event later than the Trojan war, would Homer, or any ancient Greek author, not have known of it, and would he have dared divert it from the known use to suit poetical purposes, especially in a day when poetry was regarded as a sacred medium for the preservation of what were believed to be important facts? The universal concurrence of tradition, admittedly anterior to the Iliad, renders it impossible that Homer should have invented or falsified important details of an almost sacred character, merely to furnish vraisemblance to his poem. The poetic imagination could not use its fire to nobler purpose than in painting the heroic struggle against fate and force of fated Hector; but what poetic necessity other than that of obeying the duty of a poet in preserving the dignities of heroes could be met by Æneas's recital of his genealogy as the son of Anchises, who was the son of Capys, who was the son of Assaracus, who was the son of Tros, who was the son of Dardanos, who was the son of Jupiter. That the poet himself recognizes the incongruity to the imaginative sense is shown by his making Æneas say that both he and Achilles already know each other's parentage, and after the pedigree, "but in the midst of this combat let us not talk like children." If then he delays with all these details, it is because they were a necessary part of the history he sung, and because the traditions he recounted were clear and definite, as delivered to him, and it is utterly incredible that with such detail on secondary matters the age of Homer should have lost the traditions of the site of Troy.

The question, then, reduces itself to this was there ever a Troy, and if so, did the author of the Iliad correctly locate it? The concurrence of traditions, with the Egyptian inscriptions which have been interpreted, leave hardly a rational doubt of the former; and as to the latter, the

existence of a city of that mythical period known as the Pelasgic on the heights of Bounarbashi-the situation itself, the fittest in that portion of Asia Minor for an important and powerful city; the universality of the early belief in this city, as shown by the visit of Xerxes to it, which we can hardly concede to have been caused by his knowledge of the Iliad; the overwhelming importance which the Trojan war had in the feeling of all Hellas, and which, while it might greatly magnify the glory and heroism of it, could scarcely allow so important an item to pass out of knowledge; and, above all, the scarcely-to-be-disputed consideration that it was the Trojan war and the Hellenic pride in it which made the Iliad, not the Iliad which made the pride or invented the war-all these considerations, duly weighed, will leave the balance of probabilities so much in favour of the actual war and an actual Troy, substantially the basis of the Iliad, that we should be more surprised if the poem were found to be a pure fiction even than to find it true history. It is next to impossible that circumstances for three thousand years should have so combined as to make such a chain of evidence.

So that, myths and all considered, all the uncertainties and limitations of the poetic imagination duly weighed, there does not seem to be sufficient reason for rejecting the hypothesis of the existence of an actual city which would have been the object of a struggle between the Greek and Asiatie tribes, for doubting that the author of the Iliad intended to designate Bounarbashi as the site of Troy: (if the Iliad were the result of a kind of school of poetry, there was still less probability of the designation being made without reliable traditional knowledge). The probabilities are enormously in favour of its being the site sought for, and somewhat in favour of finding something, by complete excavation, to indicate such to be the fact.

But while this latter point is very uncertain, there is one test which would almost certainly determine this exceedingly curious (and, if determined, very important) point in ancient history, i.e. the excavation of what must have been the position of the Greek army itself. The chance of variation of this position is limited to one direction; for east and west the limits of the plain are invariable, and the plain has only grown northwards, being shut in by hills on each side. The ground occupied by a camp for even half the years the Trojan war is supposed to have lasted would inevitably have been covered with an immense deposit of all kinds of rubbish, which the washing of the river would only cover deeper. A trench driven along that part of the plain, parallel to the course of the river, would, to a certainty, throw up some trace of the camp-not gold and silver vases, or valuable arms, but broken weapons and little trifles not worth picking up in their day, but now worth more than Schliemann's gold and silver put together, since they would not only confirm one of the most important traditions of the classical world, but give a means of ascertaining approximately its date, and so prove or disprove all the assigned dates of early Greek history. If anything were found there of

the nature sought, it would complete the chain of circumstantial evidence which the topography of the Iliad has begun, and, besides fixing a point in history, give us the earliest object of archæological interest to which a positive place can be assigned in the classical cycle. The Trojan war is the field where the mists of mythology begin to disclose personality and history; to find something of this epoch would enable us perhaps to fix the period at which the change took place. We must not be so exacting or so credulous as Schliemann, and ask for something which shall be Agamemnon's or Ajax's; but a broken lance, a shattered helmet or fragment of a shield, the foundations of a wall, or some article which served as medium of exchange, would illuminate that mythic twilight in a marvellous way.

But what, then, is Schliemann's discovery? Certainly a city not of the earliest date. He digs down through the Greek city of New Troy, and finds below it evidence of barbaric life-ashes, débris of buildings built mainly of wood, or at best of small stones and earth; then going down still he finds stone implements, pottery, knives of flint and implements of bone, and then still deeper he comes on bronze implements, and finds a ruin of cut stone with many bronze implements mixed with stone, and what he considers as Priam's treasure. But unfortunately for his conclusions he found below this a city of a superior state of civilisation which, for whatever reason, he did not trouble himself to investigate. Perhaps he saw that it would disprove his Trojan theory.

It is unfortunate that the enthusiastic Doctor has so little archæological knowledge or judgment that we can accept none of his conclusions as of any authority, and the photographs he has sent out with his book are so bad as to be utterly worthless-mostly made from bad drawings, and of these none made with intelligent reference to the important data in such excavations, the character of the walls and the manner of working the stone. The single fact of a city having preceded that which he supposes to be Troy would be sufficient to upset his hypothesis, especially if this be of a higher stage of civilisation, and this, the most important fact developed by the excavation, the simple-minded archeologist (?) neglected to follow up.

The articles which he calls Priam's treasure prove nothing. The ornaments very much resemble the jewellery made to-day in the interior of Asia Minor in style of workmanship, and not a little in general character. The mixture of copper and stone is only apparently confusing, for the use of flint implements for certain purposes lasted long after the age of bronze as in North America; with the Jews even, where the knives for circumcision were flint, for the simple reason that it gave sharp cutting edges which no metals would until the art of tempering them was discovered. The bronze lance would pierce and the bronze helmet protect, bronze axes even might well chop wood; but to cut the tough hide of a bull, to make a quick and properly chirurgical incision, a keen flint edge is still better than a blunt knife. The mound at Marathon is covered, after