Here, therefore, is a suggestion at once practically useful, and which furnishes more than one important elucidation to passages in Homer hitherto unintelligible. For the sake of one other such passage, we shall, before dismissing the subject, pause upon a novel fact, communicated by Mr. Mure, which is equally seasonable as a new Homeric light, and as a serviceable hint in a situation of extremity. In the passage already quoted under Pope's version from Odyssey, xiv. 29, what is the meaning of that singular couplet-- 'Down sate the sage; and cautious to withstand, Let fall the offensive truncheon from his hand.' [Footnote 2] Mr. Mure's very singular explanation will remind the naturalist of something resembling it in the habits of buffaloes. Dampier mentions a case which he witnessed in some island with a Malay population, where a herd of buffaloes continued to describe concentric circles, by continually narrowing around a party of sailors; and at last submitted only to the control of children _not too far beyond the state of infancy_. The white breed of wild cattle, once so well known at Lord Tankerville's in Northumberland, and at one point in the south-west of Scotland, had a similar instinct for regulating the fury of their own attack; but it was understood that when the final circle had been woven, the spell was perfect; and that the herd would 'do business' most effectually. As respects the Homeric case, 'I,' (says Mr. Mure,) 'am probably not the only reader who has been puzzled to understand the object of this manoeuvre' (the sitting down) 'on the part of the hero. I was first led to appreciate its full value in the following manner:--At Argos one evening, at the table of General Gordon,' (then commanding-in-chief throughout the Morea, and the best historian of the Greek revolution, but who subsequently resigned, and died in the spring of 1841, at his seat in Aberdeenshire,) 'the conversation happened to turn, as it frequently does where tourists are in company, on this very subject of the number and fierceness of the Grecian dogs; when one of the company remarked that he knew of a very simple expedient for appeasing their fury. Happening on a journey to miss his road, and being overtaken by darkness, he sought refuge for the night at a pastoral settlement by the wayside. As he approached, the dogs rushed out upon him; and the consequences might have been serious had he not been rescued by an old shepherd, (the Eumeus of the fold,) who after pelting off his assailants, gave him a hospitable reception in his hut. The guest made some remark on the zeal of his dogs, and on the danger to which he had been exposed from their attack. The old man replied 'that it was his own fault, from not taking the customary precaution in such an emergency; that he ought to have stopped, and _sate down_ until some person came to protect him.' Here we have the very act of Ulysses; with the necessary circumstance that he laid aside