During the past thirty years our knowledge of the beginnings of Greek history has undergone a transformation, which is associated with the now familiar names of Mycenae and Cnossus. Nearly all that was written on early Greece by Grote and the other brave men before Agamemnon--who is Schliemann--may now be safely left unread. The striking discoveries of Schliemann, however, at Mycenae, Tiryns, and Troy, did not revolutionize our view of pre-Homeric Greece, though they suggested a new perspective. It is the startling facts revealed by the Cretan exploration of Mr. Arthur Evans that have opened the door into a new world full of surprises--an unsuspected civilization reaching back through a period measured not by centuries but by millennia. The prolegomena to Greek history now consist of an entirely new set of facts and a new set of problems. At the same time we have been learning a great deal more about the old civilizations in the near East contemporary with this Aegean civilization which has sprung upon our vision like a magic castle built in a night. Our knowledge of Egypt, Babylonia, and Assyria has become not only more extensive but clearer and more precise; and the importance of the Hittites in Asia Minor and Syria, though their own documents are still a sealed book, is emerging from obscurity. One of the first thoughts that occur in connexion with the above is that we must still be careful about the statements of historians, whenever they tend to minimize or restrict; for, as they have altered their views before, so they may alter them again. We are bidden to throw our Grote into the waste-basket; but many will say that the claims made on behalf of that now despised scholarship were not lacking in positiveness. The views founded on this older scholarship have been made the basis for attacks on the views put forward and advocated by Theosophists; but now we find the opinions of scholarship revised, and altered more into conformity with some of the Theosophical views. Naturally, therefore, Theosophists infer that another thirty years will have witnessed yet further concessions on the part of scholarship; and they look forward to seeing all the statements of H. P. Blavatsky verified one by one as time goes on. They likewise conceded the apparent necessity, due to certain traits of human nature which we all have, of assuming a positive and dogmatic attitude with each new step in discovery, regardless of the logic of the case which would bid one apply to the future the lesson of the past, and put forward with due modesty views that are liable to change. Said H. P. Blavatsky, in the Introduction to _The Secret Doctrine_, published in 1888: