that all would agree with the statement in the second line of the second paragraph on page 39, and they would also feel that to decipher and interpret these anagrams, as Professor Margoliouth had done, was a similar "miracle of ingenuity." We, therefore, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, were not altogether behind those wonderful men who had flourished in such remote times, for to decipher such a puzzle was almost, if not quite, as wonderful as to invent it.

Mr. PRICKARD had admired immensely the extraordinary ingenuity and diligence of his friend, Professor Margoliouth. It was wonderful that an ancient poet should have managed to wrap up his meaning in this cryptic framework, but it really seemed to be even more wonderful that now at length, in the twentieth century, his interpreter should have come. He had no right himself to speak on Homeric study, but one point seemed to him to require explanation, and that was how the very acute minds that had dealt with Homer in past centuries had failed to give any indication of these cryptic revelations. Plutarch, who so intensely enjoyed anything ingenious, failed to indicate that anything of this kind might lie behind the Homeric poems. For the rest he would rather hear the effect on the present audience of the very remarkable paper to which they had listened. It would be a great relief to have done away with a period of assumed "oral tradition," and to have a definite literary date connected with the poems.

Mr. E. J. BROOKS said that the Greek poet Theognis, who wrote elegiacs about 546 B.C., stated in his poetry that he had "put his seal upon it in such a way that no one else shall plagiarize it." Yet after a careful search, he (the speaker) could not find any editor or critic who had any definite idea as to what the seal was. Perhaps Professor Margoliouth knew the cryptogram of Theognis or would yet be able to discover it.

Mr. E. W. MAUNDER said he thought the Victoria Institute was exceptionally favoured that afternoon by the paper which Professor Margoliouth had set before it; the paper itself was so very remarkable in its novelty, originality and importance, and this was the very first time that Professor Margoliouth had communicated it to the world. He did not feel at all competent to criticize the point round which the whole paper turned-the question of the

anagrams—but in his own line, astronomy, he had once had something to do with an anagram, and he thought that the anecdote might illustrate the use and value of the anagram in earlier times and also the danger attaching to it.

It would be remembered that when the telescope was first invented Galileo, when he made some of his earliest discoveries, was very anxious to establish his claim to the priority and yet to carry on his observations and work them out yet further before he published his discoveries to the world. The course he adopted was to write in short epigrammatic form a statement of the discovery, and then turn it into an anagram, and it was the anagram which he published. Later on, when his observations were complete, he could publish the solution of the anagram together with the fuller details. Other astronomers followed the same custom; amongst them, Christian Huygens, who used this method to announce his discovery of a satellite of Saturn in the year 1655. Among other astronomers to whom he sent this cryptogram was Dr. Wallis, a friend of Sir Christopher Wren. Dr. Wallis replied by sending a long anagram to Huygens, and when Huygens published the interpretation of his anagram, Dr. Wallis, in answer to his challenge, gave the solution of his. Both anagrams signified the same thing. Had Wallis made an independent discovery? Wallis never claimed it for himself. Was he then attempting to work off a fraud on Huygens, and if so, how did he accomplish it? He (the speaker) had gone into the subject and came to the conclusion that Wallis had simply added a number of letters to the anagram of Huygens in the expectation that, when Huygens explained the meaning of his anagram, he would be able to frame a sentence to the same general effect from the greater number of letters at his disposal. He did this, not in order to establish a spurious claim to a discovery that he had not really made, but in order to prove to Huygens that the method of anagrams was not a safe one, but was open to a falsification which it would be difficult to expose. Letters have since been published which show that this inference as to the methods and motive of Wallis was correct in every particular.

This anecdote might be sufficient to remind us that there was a time when anagrams were undoubtedly used for a purpose strictly analogous to that which Professor Margoliouth has ascribed to Homer; it also pointed out that the device was not without its

dangers. There was also a very suggestive feature about Wallis's solution of his anagram; these astronomical discoveries were always published in Latin in those days, and the Latin of Wallis's anagram was very "doggy" indeed; so much so, that, in his opinion, it proved that it was not an original utterance, but that Wallis had been obliged to force the words to fit an interpretation for which they had not been originally intended. That seemed to him to illustrate some of the points which Professor Margoliouth had brought out with respect to these Homeric anagrams. In the case of an anagram it was impossible so to arrange it that the language was as good in the secondary document as in the primary one, because language could not be made to serve two masters equally well at the same time. He (the speaker) was not a Greek scholar, and therefore he could offer no criticism of his own on Professor Margoliouth's working out of the anagrams, but it seemed to him that this would be a trustworthy criterion to apply to them. If the language in the iambic metre was better Greek than it was in the poem of Homer he thought it would afford strong support to the idea that they had there an actual anagram. Apart from that he should like to say how much he had been delighted with the paper and the references to Homer, because Professor Margoliouth had brought before them so clearly the wonderful position which Homer occupied in Greek thought and Greek literature that he was truly the founder of both. Not, indeed, that Homer had originated Greek literature, but he was of such overpowering genius that he had effaced, so far as we were concerned, those who had gone before him.

Mr. M. L. ROUSE endorsed all the praise that had been bestowed on Professor Margoliouth's discovery; the patient ingenuity shown in this unravelling of Homer's enigma closely vied with that of the poet in weaving it. That part of the solution which fixed the date of Homer's chief work as 708 B.C. had especially delighted him; but he could not agree that Homer, whose allusions to armour and adornments and to the topography of Troy had been so well confirmed by Schliemann and others, had invented his heroes and their pedigrees. He thought the Lecturer would admit that ancient. peoples preserved their genealogies better than we do to-day, and he considered that three at least of the principal Greek divinities were really the children of Lamech (Gen. iv, 19-22) who had undergone

deification. Nor did he believe that the Greek cities on the coasts of Asia Minor could properly be called colonies; he rather inferred from the tenth chapter of Genesis that they were the original settlements of the race.

The Rev. J. J. B. COLES pointed out how great had been the failure of ancient philosophies. Men had fallen into idolatry, the worship of the heavenly bodies, of human ancestors, of the powers of nature, and of abstract qualities. The Lecturer that afternoon had shown them that to Homer the Greeks were indebted for the foundations of their history, philosophy, science and religion. But in the religion of the Greeks there was a deification of the human passions.

The LECTURER, in reply, said that he would take into careful consideration the various criticisms and suggestions that had been brought forward. As regards Josepbus, he had taken a great deal of trouble in inquiring into his credibility, but he feared that the result was not very satisfactory. In reply to Mr. Prickard's observation that Plutarch and other commentators did not seem to know of the cryptograms, it occurred to him that such knowledge might be handed down only by tradition, and therefore only be known to a few persons at any time. These particular cryptograms might not have been widely known because they did not answer the question in which the Greeks were most interested; that is to say, they did not reveal which was the birthplace of Homer. He was acquainted with cases in literature where an interpretation, which was not indicated on the surface, had come to light by accident. Thus there was a particular treatise among the Jews, often referred to, in which a certain phrase had been objected to by the censors of Venice and elsewhere, so that in some editions different words and capitals were used in its place. One in particular consisted of letters normally rendered "worshippers of stars and constellations." This would seem absurd, because so few of those nations with whom the Jews had to do at this period followed that particular kind of worship. But he was once told that, as a matter of fact, what those initials really meant was "worshippers of Christ and Mary." Yet he had asked several people who had studied that treatise from childhood, but had never heard of that interpretation. It was only here and there that there was someone to whom the correct interpreta

tion of those initials was known. They might be sure that there must have been many instances of the same kind of thing in connection with ancient literature.

The Meeting adjourned at 6.10 p.m.

SUBSEQUENT COMMUNICATION.

Prof. EDWARD HULL :-Though not by any means a specialist on the above subject, I read " my Homer" with the greatest interest at school-and have never forgotten its charming story of the Siege of Troy, written as it is in the most musical of languages, and I have read the remarkable essay of Dr. Margoliouth with no less interest. The reflection occurs to me that, while the Author clearly shows how mythical are the heroes of that drama-and that their names were derived from the events and characters attributed to them—I cannot suppose that he intends to consign the whole story to the origin which he assigns to Apollo, Aphrodite and all the divinities except Zeus-namely, poetic fiction. What then comes of the discovery of Schliemann and of the ruined cities he describes? May we not suggest that there was a city at the site identified, recognisable by its geographical position as the site of Troy, and that the poet, having full knowledge of the topography of the region, made use of it as the central position for the events recorded—though it may have only been a ruin? I do not read in the Author's paper anything that militates against this view.

There is another point in connection with the settlement of the Æolian Greeks (p. 42), the date of which is not certainly known. It must have been very ancient, and the Author states that the name Ilios or Ilion is very clearly Semitic; in fact of Hebrew origin. But there is another name no less clearly Semitic, namely Danai, which may, perhaps, connect the early Greek settlers with that remarkable tribe of the Israelites-the tribe of Dan. This tribe settled on the coast of Palestine, and, like the Phoenicians, became a maritime people, coasting along the Mediterranean-and doubtless visiting the Grecian harbours and islands.