On the mainland north of Cyprus lies a most remarkable land which, forming a point of junction, a connecting-link between the East and the West, was one of the tracks of primitive emigration from Asia to Europe, and _vice versâ_. This _tête de pont_, commanding the island-bridge and the various stepping-stones of rock, is the famous Troas, occupied of old by a branch of the great Phrygian race. Hence the interest attaching to the excavations of Dr. Henry Schliemann. His works are too well known to require any detailed notice of the five (seven?) cities ‘whose successive layers of ruins, still marked by the fires that passed over them, are piled to the height of fifty (two and a half) feet above the old summit of the Hisárlik hill.’[612] The explorer’s labours, according to his editor, have passed through the ‘several stages of uncritical acceptance, hypercritical rejection, and discriminating belief’: I can only remark that the question of Troy appears farther from being settled (if possible) than it ever was; we now know only where it was not. The excavator began by placing his city of Priam in the second stratum from below, at a depth of twenty-three to thirty-three feet under the surface; and afterwards raised it to the third layer. It is regretable that the learned author did not submit his lively volume ‘Troy’ to a professed archæologist. We should not have heard so much about the Svasti, a Hittite ornament, nor should we have been told that the Trojans used ‘salt-cellars or pepper-boxes’ (p. 79); that the Ramayana Epic was ‘composed at the latest eight hundred years before Christ’ (p. 103), and that the ‘ivory, peacocks, and apes are _Sanskrit_ words with scarcely any alteration.’[613] When, therefore, I speak of ‘Troy proper,’ and ‘Trojan stratum,’ I mean only Dr. Schliemann’s Troy.