From these and a few more passages of the same sort it seems clear that Pausanias intended to describe all the most notable objects and to narrate all the most memorable traditions which he found existing or current in the Greece of his own time. It was a vast undertaking, and we need not wonder that at the outset he should have felt himself oppressed by the magnitude of it, and that consequently in the first book, dealing with Attica, his selection of notable objects should be scantier and his description of them slighter than in the later books. It was not only that he was bewildered by the multitude of things he had to say, but that he had not quite made up his mind how to say them. He was groping and fumbling after a method. As the work proceeded, he seems to have felt himself more at ease; the arrangement of the matter becomes more systematic, the range of his interests wider, the descriptions more detailed, his touch surer. Even the second book shows in all these respects a great advance on the first. To mention two conspicuous improvements, he has now definitely adopted the topographical order of description, and he prefaces his account of each considerable city with a sketch of its history. In the first book, on the other hand, an historical introduction is wholly wanting, and though Athens itself is on the whole described in topographical order, the rest of Attica is not. Only with the description of the Sacred Way which led from Athens to Eleusis does Pausanias once for all grasp firmly the topographical thread as the best clue to guide him and his readers through the labyrinth. Throughout the rest of his work the general principle on which he arranges his matter is this. After narrating in outline the history of the district he is about to describe, he proceeds from the frontier to the capital by the nearest road, noting anything of interest that strikes him by the way. Arrived at the capital he goes straight to the centre of it, generally to the market-place, describes the chief buildings and monuments there, and then follows the streets, one after the other, that radiate from the centre in all directions, recording the most remarkable objects in each of them. Having finished his account of the capital he describes the surrounding district on the same principle. He follows the chief roads that lead from the capital to all parts of the territory, noting methodically the chief natural features and the most important towns, villages, and monuments that he meets with on the way. Having followed the road up till it brings him to the frontier, he retraces his steps to the capital, and sets off along another which he treats in the same way, until in this manner he has exhausted all the principal thoroughfares that branch from the city. On reaching the end of the last of them he does not return on his footsteps, but crosses the boundary into the next district, which he then proceeds to describe after the same fashion.