The theory of the copyist Pausanias reduces itself to an absurdity. [Sidenote: Pausanias and the existing monuments.] The best proof that Pausanias has pictured for us Greece as it was in his own day and not as it had ceased to be long before, is supplied by the monuments. In all parts of the country the truthfulness of his descriptions has been attested by remains of the buildings which he describes, and wherever these remains are most numerous, as for example at Olympia, Delphi, and Lycosura, we have most reason to admire his minute and painstaking accuracy. That he was infallible has never been maintained, and if it had been, the excavations would have refuted so foolish a contention, for they have enabled us to detect some errors into which he fell. For example, he mistook the figure of a girl for that of a man in the eastern gable of the temple of Zeus at Olympia; he misinterpreted the attitude of Hercules and Atlas in one of the metopes of the same temple; he affirmed that the colossal images at Lycosura were made of a single block of marble, whereas we know that they were made of several blocks fitted together; and he described the temple of Athena Alea at Tegea as the largest in Peloponnese, though in fact it was much smaller than the temple of Zeus at Olympia. These and similar mistakes, like the slips he sometimes made in reading inscriptions, do not lend any colour to an imputation of bad faith. All they show is that he shared the common weaknesses of humanity, that his eye sometimes deceived him, that his attention sometimes flagged, that occasionally he may have lent too ready an ear to the talk of the local guides. If these are sins, they are surely not unpardonable. Those who have followed in his footsteps in Greece and have formed from personal experience some idea, necessarily slight, of the magnitude of the task he set himself and of the difficulties he had to overcome in accomplishing it, will probably be the readiest to make allowance for inevitable imperfections, will be most grateful to him for what he has done, and least disposed to censure him for what he has left undone. Without him the ruins of Greece would for the most part be a labyrinth without a clue, a riddle without an answer. His book furnishes the clue to the labyrinth, the answer to many riddles. It will be read and studied so long as ancient Greece shall continue to engage the attention and awaken the interest of mankind; and if it is allowable to forecast the results of research in the future from those of research in the past we may venture to predict that, while they will correct the descriptions of Pausanias on some minor points, they will confirm them on many more, and will bring to light nothing to shake the confidence of reasonable and fair-minded men in his honour and good faith.