sacrificed to the heroic dead before the mound was heaped over their remains; and the broken vases discovered along with them may have been those which were used at the funeral banquet. The Greek archaeologists further detected some vestiges which led them to believe that, even after the mound had been raised, sacrifices continued to be annually offered at it. This confirms Pausanias’s statement that the men who fell in the battle were worshipped as heroes by the people of Marathon. From an inscription we learn that the Athenian lads went to the tomb, laid wreaths on it, and sacrificed to the dead. The excavations have finally disproved a theory, broached by E. Curtius in 1853 and maintained by Professor Milchhöfer as late as 1889, that, the mound was prehistoric and had nothing to do with the battle of Marathon. For the black-figured vases found with the bones and ashes of the dead belong to the period of the Persian wars; the human remains can therefore be no other than those of the hundred and ninety-two Athenians who fell at Marathon. Curtius’s erroneous theory was apparently countenanced by some imperfect excavations made by Dr. Schliemann in 1884. Many bronze arrow-heads, about an inch long and pierced with a round hole at the top for the reception of the shaft, have been picked up at the mound; also a great number of black flints, rudely chipped into shape. It has been conjectured that these flints are parts of the stone-headed arrows discharged by the Ethiopian archers in the Persian army. But against this opinion it has been urged that similar flints have been found at other ancient sites in Attica and elsewhere, especially in the oldest graves on many Greek islands, and have not been found at Thermopylae and Plataea, where, if anywhere, the stone-headed arrows may be supposed to have flown in showers.