52 



REV. PROFESSOR D. S. MARGOLIOUTH, D.LITT., ON 



dangers. There was also a very suggestive feature about Wailis's 

 solution of his anagram ; these astronomical discoveries were always 

 published in Latin in those days, and the Latin of Wailis'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 bad 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 con- 

 firmed 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 



