Besides these more precious objects, Dr. Schliemann met with a quantity of what, for want of a better name, may be called idols, consisting of flat pieces of stone, marbles, and terra-cotta, [and, in one instance, of the vertebra of some antediluvian animal,] containing on one side “an attempt to model a face whether human or owlish.” Such objects are not rare. In the British Museum are many flat pieces of burnt clay, with moulding on them, of the rudest kind, not wholly unlike what Dr. Schliemann found. Dr. Schliemann sees in these the original type of the sacred owl of Minerva,—to say the least,—a very bold guess. Indeed, but for the place where they were found, their remote antiquity might be doubted, as they might be, after all, but degraded types of a good period of art. Dr. Schliemann, however, maintains that many of these strange owl-headed objects of clay are representatives of Athene,—in fact, the original type of the γλαυκῶπις θεὰ, the “goddess with the bright or flashing eyes,” and, also, that this epithet ought to be now translated the “owl-faced goddess”! But though Dr. Schliemann may urge in favour of his views that, as the worship of Athene was of Oriental origin, there is no reason why she should not have been represented as owl-faced, just as we find an eagle-headed Nisroch, a hawk-headed Ra, and a ram-headed Ammon, there is, really, no evidence in favour of his theory. Mr. Newton has embraced everything in his remark that “the conception of the human form as an organic whole, a conception we meet with in the very dawn of Greek art, nowhere appears” in Dr. Schliemann’s collections, the probability being that these objects are of an antiquity long antecedent to anything Greek, and the work of a people in no way connected with the Greeks. In Greek art, the usual adjunct to most representations of Athene on coins is the owl, while in Homer (Odyss. iii. 372) Athene leaves Nestor, under the form of an osprey. It is possible, therefore, that these metamorphoses symbolize a still earlier faith.