SCIENCE AND POLITICS 143 



N.E. corner of the Mount. At the same time I shall 

 prosecute with the greatest energy the excavations 

 East and West of the Great Tower, in order to lay bare 

 a great portion of the ancient walls of circumclusion, 

 which Homer ascribes to Neptune and Apollo. 



To the East of the Tower I have great hopes to find 

 in the upper layers the Temple of Apollo, built by 

 Lysimachus, and, 14 or 15 metres below it, the ancient 

 one which is mentioned in the Iliad, I am sure that 

 from the modern Apollo Temple derive all those Corin- 

 thian columns which you will have noticed in a small 

 excavation, and almost at the surface, at the foot of the 

 south-east corner of the Mount. 



The Triglyph Clock, which I found in the ruins of the 

 Lysimachus' Minerva Temple, and of which I send you 

 herewith a copy, proves, of course, that this Temple was 

 of Doric order, and, this being the oldest order of 

 architecture, I have no doubt that I shall find the ancient 

 Minerva Temple to be built in the same style. I am 

 going to present to your British Museum a mould of my 

 metope, which Mr. Newton thinks to be a little earlier 

 than the time of Lysimachus. Professor KovfiavovS-qs 

 here is of Mr. Newton's opinion, and thinks that master- 

 piece to have been made between the epoch of Pericles 

 and Alexander the Great. 



You have doubtless visited on the islands of Thera and 

 Therassia the ruins of the prehistoric buildings, which the 

 members of the French school here have brought to light 

 there by their excavations and which are covered, on 

 an average, with 68 feet of volcanic ashes. The latter 

 have, as the layers of those islands show, been thrown 

 out by that gigantic central volcano, by the lava of 

 which Thera and Therassia have been formed and which 

 must have disappeared about 1500 years before our era, 

 and archaeology therefore ascribes to those ruins an age 

 of about 2000 years before Christ. 



The objects found there are conserved here in the 

 French school, and I have examined them yesterday 

 again most carefully in order to discover some resem- 

 blance with the Trojan antiquities, but I can assure you 

 there is none whatever. Only one copper saw has been 

 found there, and no other vestige of metal. Of flint 

 saws there are but very few, all bad black flint and 

 badly made ; at Troy nearly all are of white flint and 



