A chapter of great value to the anthropologist is that upon the plants used by the natives of Mitchell and Fluiders Rivers for food, medicine, stupefying fish, weapons, and manufactures, 104 species in all. Once in a while a report of this kind is made, and it always arrests attention. Just about the time Sir John Lubbock's discussions upon the amount of land necessary to support a savage were becoming well known, our own Government-surveying parties began to send to the National Museum specimens of all the foods used by our aborigines. No one can look at the long rows of jars containing these foods without realiz ing that the great Englishman left out a large factor in his problem. The same fact appears from Mr. Palmer's lists. The Australians eat roots, bulbs, rootstalks, stems, leaves, stalks of flowers, buds, skins of stems, fruits in endless variety, and seeds. They eat some of them raw; others roasted, steamed, or macerated; and poisonous plants are subjected to a series of soaking, steeping, mashing, roasting, grinding, and baking that completely destroys the noxious quality and furnishes a wholesome food. Five of the plants named are used to sicken fish. Those set down as medicines are used as veritable drugs and not as sorcerer's charms. The list includes crushed leaves, bark, and flowers, soaked or steeped, and applied externally for a poultice or bathing, or the water is drunk. The Eucalyptus pruinosa bark is bruised and wound tightly around the chest, being kept damp with water. The patient also sits in a decoction of the plant. The young black fellows rub their faces with Drosera indica to make their whiskers grow. Eighteen plants are mentioned as furnishing material for cordage, cloth, nets, boomerangs, reed spears, shields, etc.

He has again visited the Troad; he has again hired laborers, and lived in tents, and brought with him great experts, in order to clear up and verify what remained obscure and doubtful in his former investigations. The main difficulty in his mind was the apparent smallness of the early city which he found to have been burned, and which seemed certainly the city which gave a basis and a local habitation to the traditions embodied in the Iliad. The gold found there implied considerable wealth; all the legends pointed to the spot having once been occupied by a powerful and civilized people, and yet there seemed no room for them. His new book gives us the natural solution. He had mistaken the acropolis of the "second city" for the whole of it. His architects proved to them that there had been an extensive lower city around the "Pergama of Priam," which was also burned in the great catastrophe, but was not resettled or built on again. From that time small and obscure descendants occupied the royal site, and left poor and shabby traces of their life. It was not till the successors of Alexander enlarged and beautified the town, and the Romans, with

the sentimentality of vulgar upstarts, began to parade Ilium as the home of their ancestors, that another important town marked the persistent site.

Moreover, he had also failed to distinguish clearly the second and third layers of remains on this ever re-established site, for the settlers who came after the great conflagration did not level more than they wanted, and the old buildings here and there reach up through the stratum produced by the third settlement. Again, what he calls the sixth city was not marked by a layer of soil, but only by a large assortment of very peculiar non-Hellenic pottery, which he had called Lydian, but which he now declines to call by any name, while insisting upon the fact of its presence and peculiar character. The outcome of his long labor is, therefore, briefly this: on the site of Hissarlik, and there only in the Troad, there are piled up one upon the other a great series of human traces, reaching from the most remote antiquity into the decline of the Roman Empire. These human traces were separated into periods, in that each of them is covered by a more or less distinct layer of earth and ashes, upon which the next is laid. There are at least six of these layers; and what is most important and remarkable, only the topmost (sixth or seventh) is of what we call a historical character. It alone shows the distinctly Hellenic character in both its pottery, its utensils, and its buildings, and reaches a very little way (not more than six feet) into the earth. Nevertheless, we know that a small Greek town existed there for at least six centuries before Christ. If, then, the remains of such antiquity reach down to only six feet under-ground, what shall we say of the antiquity of the older settlements, which are to be traced down to fifty-two feet under the present level? The mind recoils somewhat aghast from so gigantic a computation. But the character of these older remains corroborates our conclusion. They all bear a distinctly prehistoric character. There is no trace of coinage, of writing, of painting on terra cotta, nay, in the deepest layers even the potter's wheel seems hardly known, and the wares are of the rudest hand-made description. The closer details as to these successive layers of pottery are very clearly given in a remarkable letter from Rudolph Virchow-a European name-and printed (pp. 376 et seq.) in the new volume. He there shows "that there is no place in Europe known which could be put in direct connection with any one of the lower six cities of Hissarlik." And again, after describing the character of archaic Greek pottery, he adds: "Seeing, then, that this highly characteristic archaic pottery is totally absent in the deeper strata in Hissarlik, we are at a loss to discover what in all the world is to be called Greek in them. With equal truth might many kinds of vases from Mexico and Yucatan, nay, even from the river Amazon, be called Greek." This is in answer to the ignorant people who attempt to assign late historical dates to all the successive settlements, save one. The non-Hellenic, if not pre-historic, character of these rude wares is singularly illustrated by comparing them with the oldest pottery our author found at Mycena. In the latter, though there can be little doubt that their date is not later than ten centuries before Christ, we find the unmistakable character of Hellenic work. They are the direct ancestors of the splendid vases imported to

Italy, and copied in Etruria. This fact in itself makes all skepticism as to the antiquity of the remains at Hissarlik impossible, except on grounds of ignorance. We have heard in our own day of respectable scholars who are still skeptical about the deciphering of the Egyptian hieroglyphics, and the cuneiform writings of Asia. It is quite useless arguing with such people. All one can do is to beseech them to examine the evidence without prejudice, and to examine the evidence they must, of course, learn something of the subject in hand. It is not enough to have read Homer, or Curtius's History of Greece, or to have gone to the Troad as a tourist, and to have seen the place. Archæology is a special study, infested no doubt by amateurs, but requiring honest and serious attention.

The demonstration that there existed on the site always recognized in classdays as the site of Troy, a very ancient and important city, with a citadel and such wealth that considerable remnants of gold were lost or forgotten in its ruins -a city, moreover, destroyed by a great catastrophe, and burned with fire in such a way as to preclude all accidental misfortune-makes it almost certain that the poet or poets of the Iliad, whatever historical basis their story may have, certainly attached their stories to this site, and that the memory of this great confiagration had, in some way, survived up to the time when the Iliad was composed. This, again, forces us to place the origin of this epic poetry, at least of the shorter and ruder attempts which preceded the Iliad, at an early date. The brilliant theory of August Fick, that these poems were first composed in the Æolic dialect, and then imperfectly recast in Ionic, falls in with the same argument. But we must not enter into learned discussions in this paper. It is right merely to allude to these literary and historical questions to show how important is the light thrown by Dr. Schliemann's excavations on questions which have hitherto been disputed on purely bookish grounds. Those who wish to have a large and clear view of the general course of enlightenment which our early history of Greece and Asia Minor has undergone from archæological sources, will turn to the brilliant preface with which Professor Sayce has introduced Dr. Schliemann's new volume, Troja.

We have often tried to induce Dr. Schliemann to dig on Hellenic sites, but his proper task and the general direction of his studies is to investigate pre-historic antiquity. For this purpose he has not only made his magnificent venture at Mycenae, of which the results are recorded in a special work, and exhibited in the splendid collection of gold and silver ornaments now at Athens; he has also investigated the alleged home of Ulysses in Ithaca, the great tomb-measurehouse of the legendary kings at Orchomenus, and some other less important sites. These researches have conspired with sundry discoveries of pre-historic tombs in Attica, and of archaic art about Sparta, in modifying considerably the current notions of early Greek art and its development. This is the most important outcome of Dr. Schliemann's work, and that to which we desire to call special attention. It used to be a favorite theory among scholars, and is no doubt very common among those who confine themselves to a grammatical study of Greek texts, that the Hellenic race was perfectly original in its art, that the

peculiar character of their architecture and sculpture, and painting was their own invention, and due to no foreign source. The old legends of Cadmus and Agenor and Danaus bringing the arts from the east to the south were rejected, and Greek art was considered to be purely autochthonous, as the scholars were pleased to disguise the term indigenous.

What has been now found to be the real state of the case? The historical Greeks have been everywhere preceded either by Greek ancestors, or by some kindred race who possessed both wealth and ingenuity, and had advanced no small distance both in the useful and the ornamental arts of life. Let us take, for example, the great stone buildings of Mycena. Here we find enormous stones squared, or even shaped into curves, so as to form the inner surface, perfectly regular, of a great bee-hive vault. We find heraldic sculpture used over their gates, and such massive defenses as must have mocked any assailant of those days. When Dr. Schliemann found the royal tomb within these walls, he found a vast store of ornaments, and vessels not only beautiful in shape, but delicately and gracefully ornamented, while the sculptures on stone and the gold masks on the faces of the dead were rude and ugly in the extreme. The general character of these ornaments could not be called Greek; it was strictly pre-historic, barbarous, if you please; nor could it be called Oriental; but there were not wanting traces of Oriental influence and cases of Oriental (including Egyptian) manufacture. A portion of an ostrich egg proved beyond doubt the existence of a trade with Africa. Engraved gems of strange designs pointed unmistakably to similar Babylonian or Hittite ornaments. And if we had fuller knowledge of the early art of Asia Minor, there can be no doubt that we should find the Mycenaean art was more imported than original. Not that we mean to deny the originality of the Greeks. We desire rather to correct the meaning attached to the word originality, and insist that in both art and literature pure invention is both rare and unsuccessful, and that true greatness consists in the genius of adapting and perfecting the forms or ideas handed down from earlier minds. There are some productions in which perfection of form was very early attained. The earliest and rudest pots are generally very ugly and clumsy imitations of a female human figure, sometimes of birds or beasts, and so long as this fashion persisted, no beauty was attained. But no sooner was this idea abandoned, and mere curves studied with the aid of the wheel, than we find shapes as graceful as any that can be designed in the present day-nay, superior to most of them. This is very remarkable in the gold jugs found at Mycenae, and which, though of very perfect workmanship, are undoubtedly of great antiquity. And here not only the shape, but the decoration of the surface, is both ingenious and beautiful. In terra cotta ware the surface decoration was slower in coming to perfection, but the shapes of many of the vessels found in pre-historic sites are not to be excelled. There was one vessel found at Mycenæ made of some kind of alabaster, and probably imported from Egypt, which at first sight looked for all the world like a Renaissance vase, the rim being actually a waved circle. The reader must go back to the earlier Ilios and Mycena of Dr. Schliemann for examples to

verify our statements. All his former researches at Hissarlik, and even his last visit and further excavations, did not, however, satisfy the indefatigable man, who undertook in May, 1881, a journey through the Troad, very graphically told (pp. 303-348) in his Troja. He wished to see whether there were any other prehistoric sites worth excavating, and also what could be made out about the geography of the country as described by Strabo. But, all through, the keen interest of the traveller, loving to talk with and understand the natives, and enthusiastic at the sight of natural beauty, gives life and beauty to the narrative.

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The example of Dr. Schliemann ought to lead the way to similar enterprises. Already the Dilettanti Society have added to the glories of England by their costly and conscientious publications of Greek antiquities; already the German government has shown what can be done with a very moderate outlay, intelligently directed, at Olympia, and still later at Pergamus. Let us hope that among the many men who have inherited fortunes far beyond the requirements even of luxury, some will apply their wealth to this very noble end.

For a noble end it is to inquire into the rudest remains of long-departed races, and to inquire not by theory and conjecture, but by an examination of actual facts. The pure savage attends only to the wants and pleasures of the day, and when the sun sets, has no desire but to sleep. The higher men rise out of this condition, the wider their sympathy with remote and bygone members of their race, the more do they prolong into the night the interests and pursuits of the day. This it is which has ennobled civilized man; this it is which has given dignity to the poorest and narrowest conditions of life.

But now that he has been advised to abandon his arduous labor and devote his remaining years to a better care of his delicate health, he can look back on all these distinctions as only the index of his real desert-that of having added permanently to human knowledge. What a cloud of conjecture and hypothesis has he removed from both Troy and Mycena? For if his discoveries have in turn given rise to many controversies, they are controversies about the interpretation of facts, not about the respective probability of rival theories. He has proved what modern skeptics were coming boldly to deny, that the old legends of the Greeks had a local attachment, and were based upon facts in past history. He showed that the sites of cities are permanent things, which men will not surrender even after violent catastrophes, and that we may always seek the old un der the new. The growth of legends about tombs of great men is particularly interesting, for it can be paralleled in the legendary history of other and distinct branches of the Aryan race. Above all, he has added a great store of facts for the comparative study of pre-historic man in the south of Europe. We are now beginning to see the general features in the industry and the ornaments of primitive men, and the curious truth that the pottery in all the pre-historic strata at Toy, up to the verge of the Greek remains, is perhaps less like these remains than it is to the pre-historic pottery of Italy, Germany, or even Peru, shows that we may yet attain to a general view of the state of man under certain conditions of life.-Harper's Monthly for May.