AMERICAN POTTERY. 663 
problem of Homer himself would still remain to be settled. Was Homer a real 
person? When did he live, and to what country did he belong? Are the Homeric 
poems the work of one poet or of more than one? Are the /izad and the Oajssey 
by the same person? Is the Ziad one poem, or was it formed by the insertion of 
certain books in an earlier Achrlleid? These are not new questions, and they exist 
quite independently of Schliemann’s explorations.. But these explorations throw 
a flood of light upon the Homeric problem. We need scarcely say that Schlie- 
mann believes in the actual existence of Homer and the substantial unity of the 
Homeric poems; and his researches, and the use which has been made of them 
by scholars, have immensely strengthened this side of the controversy. The 
archzological knowledge we now possess all goes to show that while Homer, to 
use the language of Mr. Gladstone, ‘‘was neither contemporary nor denizen of 
Troy,’”’ he must have been familiar with the city and its surroundings, and that he 
could not have been far removed in time from the events of which he sings. Dr. 
Schlieman is exceedingly guarded in his statements concerning the time and place 
of Homer; but we are inclined to think that Virchow does not speak too strongly 
when he says that ‘‘the //ad could not have been composed by a man who had 
not been in the country of the Ziad”; that the ‘‘bard must have stood upon the 
hill of Hissarlik and have looked out thence over land and sea,” and that ‘‘in no 
other way could he probably have combined so much truth to nature in his 
poem.” And the learned professor does not believe it possible that ‘‘a poet liv- 
ing at a distance could have evolved out of his imagination so faithful a picture 
of the land and people as embodied in the /éad.”— The Dial. 
AMERICAN POTTERY. 
PROF. F. W. PUTNAM. 
Twenty-four years ago Professor Swallow, of Missouri, explored two mounds. 
near New Madrid, in the southeastern part of that State, from which he obtained 
about a hundred specimens of pottery and numerous other objects. This collec- 
tion was secured by the Peabody museum of Archeeology at Cambridge in 1874, 
and was briefly noticed in the Eighth Report of the Museum. At the time of its. 
purchase the ‘‘ Swallow Collection” was considered of great value and impor- 
tance, as comparatively few objects of pottery were then known from the mounds. 
and ancient burial places of the Southwestern States. Since then many of the 
mounds of Southwestern Missouri and of the adjoining portions of Arkansas. 
have. been more or less thoroughly explored, and there are now probably from 
fifteen to twenty thousand objects of pottery in public and private collections 
which were obtained from that region, and are known to the archeologists under 
the general term of ‘‘ Missouri Pottery.” Although this peculiar type of pot- 
tery has received its name from first having been found in abundance in the New 
Madrid region, it would be incorrect to imply that pottery of the same general. 
character is limited to that locality; for it is also known to be more or less abun-- 
