Results of extraordinary importance have been already obtained from explorations in Crete, carried on during 1899 and 1900 by the British School at Athens, under the direction of Mr. D. G. Hogarth, and by Mr. Arthur J. Evans, of the Ashmolean Museum, working with the aid of a small Cretan Exploration Fund, raised in England. The excavations of both parties were carried on at Knossos, but the latter was the most fortunate, having opened the site of a prehistoric palace which is yielding remarkable revelations of the legendary age in Crete. In a communication to the "London Times" of October 31, 1900, Mr. Evans gave the following account of the results so far as then obtained: "The discoveries made at Knossos throw into the shade all the other exploratory campaigns of last season in the Eastern Mediterranean, by whatever nationality conducted. It is not too much to say that the materials already gathered have revolutionized our knowledge of prehistoric Greece, and that to find even an approach to the results obtained we must go back to Schliemann's great discovery of the Royal tombs at Mycenae. The prehistoric site, of which some two acres have now been uncovered at Knossos, proves to contain a palace beside which those of Tiryns and Mycenae sink into insignificance. By an unhoped-for piece of good fortune the site, though in the immediate neighbourhood of the greatest civic centres of the island in ancient, medieval, and modern times, had remained practically untouched for over 3,000 years. At but a very slight depth below the surface of the ground the spade has uncovered great courts and corridors, propylaea, a long succession of magazines containing gigantic store jars that might have hidden the Forty Thieves, and a multiplicity of chambers, pre-eminent among which is the actual throne-room and council-chamber of Homeric kings. The throne itself, on which (if so much faith be permitted to us) Minos may have declared the law, is carved out of alabaster, once brilliant with coloured designs and relieved with curious tracery and crocketed arcading which is wholly unique in ancient art and exhibits a strange anticipation of 13th century Gothic. In the throne-room, the western entrance gallery, and elsewhere, partly still adhering to the walls, partly in detached pieces on the floors, was a series of fresco paintings, excelling any known examples of the art in Mycenaean Greece. A beautiful life-size painting of a youth, with a European and almost classically Greek profile, gives us the first real knowledge of the race who produced this mysterious early civilization. Other frescoes introduce us to a lively and hitherto unknown miniature style, representing, among other subjects, groups of women engaged in animated conversation in the courts and on the balconies of the Palace.