Meanwhile, sixteen allusions to the corslet "can be cut out," as probably "some or all these are additions to the text made at a time when it seemed absurd to think of a man in full armour without a corslet." [Footnote: _Ibid_, vol. i. p. 577.] Thus the reciters, after all, did not spare "the old material" in the matter of corslets. The late singers have thus been "conservatively tenacious" in clinging to chariots, weapons of bronze, and obsolete enormous shields, while they have also been "vivid and actual" and "up to date" in the way of introducing everywhere bronze corslets, greaves, and other armour unknown, by the theory, in "the old material which is the substance of their song." By the way, they have not even spared the shield of the old material, for it was of leather or wood (we have no trace of metal plating on the old Mycenaean shields), and the singer, while retaining the size of it, has added a plating of bronze, which we have every reason to suppose that Mycenaean shields of the prime did not present to the stone-headed arrow. This theory of singers, who are at once "conservatively tenacious" of the old and impudently radical in pushing in the new, appears to us to be logically untenable. We have, in Chapter I, observed the same inconsistency in Helbig, and shall have occasion to remark again on its presence in the work of that great archaeologist. The inconsistency is inseparable from theories of expansion through several centuries. "Many a method," says Mr. Leaf, "has been proposed which, up to a certain point, seemed irresistible, but there has always been a residuum which returned to plague the inventor." [Footnote: _Iliad_, vol. ii. p. X.] This is very true, and our explanation is that no method which starts from the hypothesis that the poems are the product of several centuries will work. The "residuum" is the element which cannot be fitted into any such hypothesis. But try the hypothesis that the poems are the product of a single age, and all is harmonious. There is no baffling "residuum." The poet describes the details of a definite age, not that of the Mycenaean bloom, not that of 900-600 A.D.