the new method of research. Splendid have been the
results. If we are not sure which stratum represents the city of Priam,
we do learn how the people lived, and how fine was their work in silver
and gold, and how slight their knowledge of letters. Dr. Schliemann has
now a multitude of imitators. France and Germany and England and the
United States each maintain a school of archaeology in Athens, and each
conducts careful explorations. Our American School lost to the French,
for lack of money at the right time, the chance to explore Delphi, but
it has carried on careful explorations at Corinth and other places. How
wonderful was the discovery, not long ago, of a shipload of bronze and
marble statues wrecked while being transported as spoil of war from
Corinth to Rome!

But the most surprising discoveries in the realm of old Greek history
and art are those that have been made in these last two or three years
in Crete. Crete was a famous centre of ancient Greek legend. Jupiter was
born and reared on Mount Ida. From another mountain summit in Crete the
gods watched the battle on the plains of Troy. There ruled Minos, who
first gave laws to men, and who at his death was sent by the gods to
judge the shades as they entered the lower world. There was the famous
Labyrinth, and there the Minotaur devoured his annual tale of maidens
until he was slain by Theseus. Was there such a real palace of Minos as
the Greek poets sung? The magnificent palace of the Cretan kings at
Cnossus has been found, by Mr. Evans, with its friezes, its spiral
ornaments, its flounce-petticoated women, its treasuries, and its
tablets written in a script so old that it cannot yet be read, but which
will be read as surely as scholarship leaves none of its riddles
unsolved. The childhood of Greece, its mighty infancy, out of which it
grew to be the creator and the example of all the world's culture, is
even now being exposed to our view, safely kept to be recovered by the
scholars of our generation.

Of interest rather to the student of the curiosities of history are the
mounds and pyramids and temples built by the aborigines of America; for
these tribes have had absolutely no part in creating our dominant
civilization or developing its art. China and Japan are, at this late
day, giving something to the world's store of beauty and utility; but
the mound-builders and cliff-dwellers, the Mayas and Toltecs and Incas,
have given absolutely nothing which the wor