been reasonably supposed that only the foundations of the walls were of stone or brick, the upper part, like many Eastern houses at the present day, being wholly of wood, which would readily catch fire, and fill the rooms below with burning embers. In several of the rooms of one of these houses Dr. Schliemann found red jars from 7 to 8 feet high, and, to the east of the house, what he assumes to have been a sacrificial altar, a slab of granite 5 feet 4 inches long by 5 feet 5 inches broad. Such a conflagration, it is likely, would be long remembered; and it has been acutely asked whether, after all, there may not have been an Asiatic Iliad handed down from mouth to mouth, of which Homer may have availed himself, as did the mediæval Minnesingers. The next and the greatest of Schliemann’s discoveries was also one of his last: we give it in his own words. “In the course of excavations on the Trojan wall, and in the immediate neighbourhood of Priam’s house, I lighted on a great copper object of remarkable form, which attracted my attention all the more, as I thought I saw gold behind. Upon this copper object rested a thick crust of red ashes and calcined ruins, on which again weighed a wall nearly 6 feet thick and 18 feet high, built of great stones and earth, and which must have belonged to the period next after the destruction of Troy. In order to save this treasure from the greed of my workmen, and to secure it for science, it was necessary to use the very greatest haste, and so, though it was not yet breakfast- time, I had “paidos,” or resting-time, called out at once. While my workmen were eating and resting I cut out the treasure with a great knife, not without the greatest effort and the most terrible risk of my life, for the great wall of the fortress which I had to undermine, threatened every moment to fall upon me. But the sight of so many objects, of which each alone is of inestimable worth to science, made me foolhardy, and I thought of no danger. The carrying off, however, of the treasures would have been impossible without the help of my dear wife, who stood by ready to pack up the objects in her shawl as I cut them out, and to take them away.”