It is true that a different view has been advocated by Sir William Geddes, who, in his valuable work, ‘The Problem of the Homeric Poems,’ first dwelt in detail on the contrasted treatment of the horse and dog in those early epics. He did not, however, stop there. A theory, designed to solve the secular puzzle of Homeric authorship, had presented itself to him, and demanded for its support a somewhat complex marshalling of facts. His contention was briefly this:—that the Odyssey, with the ten books of the Iliad[60] amputated by Mr. Grote’s critical knife from the trunk of a supposed primitive Achilleid, are the work of one and the same author, an Ionian of Asia Minor, to whom the venerable name of Homer properly belongs; while the fourteen books constituting the nucleus and main substance of our Iliad are abandoned to an unknown Thessalian bard. He has not, indeed, succeeded in engaging on his side the general opinion of the learned, yet it cannot be denied that his ingenious and patient analysis of the Homeric texts has served to develop some highly suggestive minor points. The validity of his main argument obviously depends, in the first place, upon the discovery of striking correspondences between the Odyssey and the non-Achillean cantos of the Iliad; in the second, upon the exposure of irreconcilable discrepancies between the Odyssey and the Grotean Achilleid. But the attempt is really hopeless to transplant the canine sympathy manifest in the Odyssey to any part of the Iliad, or to localise in any particular section of the Iliad the equine sympathies displayed throughout the many-coloured tissue of its composition. Footnote 60: These are Books ii. to vii. inclusive, ix. x. xxiii. and xxiv. The _Achilleid_ thus consists of Books i. viii. and xi.-xxii.