Of all the discoveries yet made on Cretan soil, that which, in the end, will doubtless prove to be of the greatest importance is the discovery of the various systems of writing which the Minoans successively devised and used. As yet knowledge with regard to these systems has not advanced beyond the description of the materials and their comparison with those furnished by other scripts, a task which has so far been accomplished by Dr. Evans in the first volume of his 'Scripta Minoa.' An immense amount of material has been accumulated, and has been separated into various classes, which have been shown to be characteristic of different periods of Minoan history. It is possible to arrive at a general understanding of the matters to which certain items of the material refer, but the actual reading of the inscribed tablets has as yet proved to be impossible. To all appearance, moreover, a considerable proportion of the material appears to be not literary, in any true sense, but to consist of inventories and accounts, perhaps also of legal documents and other such records of purely business and practical interest. Even so it would be a matter of no small importance could it be found possible to decipher the records, let us say, of the War Office or Admiralty of Knossos, or to survey the details of royal house-keeping in those far-off days; and it may still be hoped that, when the ardently desired bilingual inscription at last turns up and makes decipherment possible, we may find that documents of more genuinely literary interest are not altogether lacking. One thing at least is abundantly clear--that, as Dr. Evans put it in the summary of his first year's results, 'that great early civilization was not dumb,' but, on the contrary, had means of expression amply adequate to its needs.