When archaeological discoveries during the last forty years had thrown some light on the pre-Homeric age, then the material objects found were raked and sifted for proof of the foregone conclusion--the Epic is a mosaic of four or five centuries. We have examined the results of the archaeological inquisition into discrepancies in religion, custom, armour, tactics, and so forth. We try to prove that, in all such details, the epics are the work of a single moment of culture; and again, that no other work of the Greek genius, and no material relics of other moments of Greek culture, represent the religion, polity, armour, costume, morality, and taste of Homer. Not in these fields of ascertainable facts can the proof that the Epics are by many men in many ages be discovered. Except in the general conclusion that the _Iliad_ is a mosaic, produced (most of them think) by a long series of Ionian additions to an Achaean "kernel," there is no harmony among critics. For example, English savants usually, like Mr. Leaf, make no objections to the unity of the _Odyssey_. They do not read it in the same spirit, or torment it in the same style, as they rack and lacerate the _Iliad_. With Wolf, they recognise its unity, though it arose in the same dark age, and passed through the same adventures as the _Iliad_. Yet in Germany the _Odyssey_ is even more and more variously lacerated than the _Iliad_. Turning to the most recent English book on the subject, _Homer and the Iliad_, by Miss Stawell (1909), we find that while she rejects 6,000 out of 15,000 lines as non-original, she cannot believe in the critics' "original _Menis_" of only some 2500 lines. She, like the rest, believes (what Wolf did not believe) "that it is quite possible to disentangle the original core of the _Iliad_ from the present mass." But of her _Iliad_, her "core" is by far the greater part, not a poor sixth. I am tempted to quote a long passage from Miss Stawell, because it seems to contain sound sense, and to be guided by fine literary appreciation. "The reconstructions actually proposed seem open to serious criticisms. It appears to me that certain important considerations have been overlooked, and that in their light we should discover the original to be far more like the _Iliad_ as we have it now than has usually been supposed.