From the Homeric age until the approach of the Persian war, our notices of the Hellenes are so nearly limited to the Greeks of Asia, that the state of Thessaly, Bœotia, Attica, and the Peloponnesus--European and Continental Greece--is obscure; Athens, however, and Sparta are the parts that then command notice; not Miletus, Smyrna, or Lesbos. _Hellas_, too, as a collective name, has been developed. On the coast of Asia there is an Æolis, a Doris, and an Ionia, all of which the Hellenes look upon as settlements from corresponding parts of Greece, and there is division of the Hellenes themselves, of considerable political importance, into two classes--the Dorian and Ionian. These differences between their own age and the Homeric, the great historians of the Golden Age of Greek literature explained as they best could. Are we bound to admit their explanation? Not for the Pelasgi, because we can get no definite doctrine at all concerning them. Nor yet, in my mind, for the Doric, Æolic, and Ionic migrations in their details. I cannot believe that the Ionic dialect ever came out of Greece; holding, that nothing but a most undue deference to authority and opinion can deduce it directly from any older form of the Attic. And this is but one objection out of many. Indeed I submit to the reader’s consideration the doctrine that the differences expressed by the terms in question, are best explained and accounted for by supposing, either-- 1. A difference between the original Italian populations; or-- 2. A difference in the elements which were supplied in Greece itself. Thus--admixture and alliance with the original population of Thessaly and South Macedon, rather than with that of Epirus may have determined the Æolian character; admixture and alliance with the South Epirotes rather than the Thessalians, the Doric; Semitic elements the Ionic. In the first and last instances, there may also have been a different starting-point from Italy; the Ionians being derived from the coast that gave its name to the Ionian Sea, the Æolians from the district to which Æolus was the eponymus.