Such a school could keep an eye on anachronisms and excise them; in fact, the Maori priests, in an infinitely more barbarous state of society, had such schools for the preservation of their ancient hymns in purity. The older priests "insisted on a critical and verbatim rehearsal of all the ancient lore." Proceedings were sanctioned by human sacrifices and many mystic rites. We are not told that new poems were produced and criticised; it does not appear that this was the case. Pupils attended from three to five years, and then qualified as priests or _tohunga_ [Footnote: White, _THE Ancient HISTORY OF THE Maori, VOL._ i. pp. 8-13.]. Suppose that the Asiatic Greeks, like the Maoris and Zunis, had Poetic Colleges of a sacred kind, admitting new poets, and keeping them up to the antique standard in all respects. If this were so, the relative rarity of "anachronisms" and of modernisms in language in the Homeric poems is explained. But Mr. Leaf has now entirely and with a light heart abandoned his theory of a school, which is unsupported by evidence, he says.' "The great problem," he writes, "for those who maintain the gradual growth of the poems by a process of crystallisation has been to understand how a single version came to be accepted, where many rival versions must, from the necessity of the case, have once existed side by side. The assumption of a school or guild of singers has been made," and Mr. Leaf, in 1892, made the assumption himself: "as some such hypothesis we are bound to make in order to explain the possibility of any theory" (1892). [Footnote: _COMPANION TO THE Iliad, pp. 20, 21._] But now (1900) he says, after mentioning "the assumption of a school or guild of singers," that "the rare mention of [Greek: Homeridai] in Chios gives no support to this hypothesis, which lacks any other confirmation." [Footnote: _Iliad_, vol. i. xviii. p. xix.] He therefore now adopts the Wolfian hypothesis that "an official copy of Homer was made in Athens at the time of Solon or Pisistratus," from the rhapsodies existing in the memory of reciters. [Footnote: _Iliad_, vol. i. p. xix.] But Mr. Leaf had previously said [Footnote: _COMPANION TO THE Iliad_, p. 190.] that "the legend which connects his" (Pisistratus's) "name with the Homeric poems is itself probably only conjectural, and of late date." Now the evidence for Pisistratus which, in 1892, he thought "conjectural and of late date," seems to him a sufficient basis for an hypothesis of a Pisistratean editor of the Iliad, while the evidence for an Homeric school which appeared to him good enough for an hypothesis in 1892 is rejected as worthless, though, in each case, the evidence itself remains just what it used to be.