_Iron shoes and collars_ once having served as bands round wooden posts, possibly to keep them from splitting, especially in a climate where there are daily such rapid changes from heat to cold, and which plays such havoc with the modern imported timber. These bands, which average almost an inch in width, generally passed twice round the post, and the shapes of the circumference of the post are square, oblong (these are the most frequent), or circular, but always perfectly exact, showing that the ancients and older inhabitants of the ruins used wood that had been specially shaped with tools, and not the rough, unworked poles used by old and present natives, many of which can be still seen never to have been touched with any tool save in cutting it from the tree and in lopping off small branches. These shoes and collars are found on very old floors, their greatest length or diameter being 4¾ in. One important fact is clearly demonstrated by the presence in quantities on the older floors of nails and shoes, and it is that the original builders and their more immediate successors extensively employed woodwork in the fittings of all the enclosures, some of it being of large dimensions, and in all probability worked with tools, and not used in the rough state. The general distribution of these nails and shoes throughout the enclosures, and at some depth, convinces one that substantial wooden fittings once existed in these enclosures, for the large sizes of the older forms of nails and the make of the shoes and collars preclude any suggestion of many of them having been used in woodwork which could have been easily removed. A _forked iron instrument_ (Pl. II., fig. 5), with six gold bosses riveted with gold on to the iron, is certainly of a very antique character, though possibly not an article belonging to the original builders, for the condition of the iron and its location, while pointing to some antiquity, rather precludes any idea of its being of the earliest date. This was found in the Western Temple at the Acropolis ruins, at a point near, but not so deep as, the spot which Mr. Swan styles “the centre of the arc of the curved and decorated main wall of the Western Temple on the hill.” The _iron pincers_ (Pl. II., fig. 2), found with the gold scorifiers on an intermediate floor in the Elliptical Temple, are of simple construction, and are made of a bar of iron tapered at each end and doubled together, the doubled end being hammered close, but not welded. Traces of flux are on the tapered points. A second pair of iron pincers, but not in such good condition, were found on an intermediate floor in the Acropolis ruins.