354 A Century of /Science 



nuity. I told her I did not wonder that old dry- 

 asdust philologists should hold such views, but I 

 was indeed surprised to find such a literary artist 

 as herself ignoring the impassable gulf between 

 Homer s language and that which any ballad the 

 ory necessarily implies. She had no answer for 

 this except to say that she should have supposed 

 an evolutionist like me would prefer to regard the 

 Homeric poems as gradually evolved rather than 

 suddenly created ! A retort so clever and amiable 

 most surely entitled her to the woman s privilege 

 of the last word. 



The Wolfian theory may now be regarded as a 

 thing of the past ; it has had its day and been 

 flung aside. If Wolf himself were living, he would 

 be the first to laugh a j j it. Its original prop has 

 been knocked away, since it has become pretty 

 clear that the art of writing was practised about 

 the shores of the ^Egean Sea long before 1100 

 B. c. Even Wolf would now admit that it might 

 have been a real letter that Bellerophon carried 

 to the father of Anteia. 1 All attempts to show 

 a lack of unity in the design of the Iliad and the 

 Odyssey have failed irretrievably, and the dis 

 cussion has served only to make more and more 

 unmistakable the work of the mighty master. The 

 1 Iliad, vi. 108. 



