104 Proceedings of the Royal Society 
or attitude of the original composer. (3.) Not a few of the most 
prominent differential features emphasized by Professor Geddes are 
to be looked rather as the two sides of one rich mind than as the 
diverse workmanship of two different minds. A great poet will be 
as tender on one occasion as he is fierce on another, and Goethe is 
not the less author of “Torquato Tasso” because he is the author of 
“ Faust.” (4.) Not the least objection to the books exsected by Mr 
Grote, and appropriated by Professor Geddes, being attributed lo 
the author of the “ Odyssey,” is the fact that some of these books 
are at once the most poetically impressive and the most fully charged 
with the fervour peculiar to the “ Iliad,” and, if they are not abso- 
lutely necessary to what Mr Grote calls the logical sequence of the 
poem, do certainly contribute most largely to its effect as a work of 
art. (5.) Some of the differential features dwelt on by the Aber- 
deen Professor are either too slight, too sparse, and too equivocal to 
warrant any sure induction, or are explained most naturally by the 
character and tone of the poem, and the nature of the subject. In 
the quiet books of the “ Iliad” some things would naturally occur 
that are more kindred to the gentle tone of the “ Odyssey,” than the 
fervid and somewhat fierce tone and contents of those books of the 
“Iliad” where Achilles is the dominant figure. (6.) Lastly, the 
theory of development in moral and religious matters applied by 
Professor Geddes to the “ Odyssey,” and what he calls the Odyssean 
books of the “Iliad,” Professor Blackie felt himself compelled flatly 
to deny. Jove is in every respect as stern and just a moral governor 
of the world in the “ Iliad” as in the “ Odyssey and the haughti- 
ness of Agamemnon meets with its retribution, as publicly and as 
prominently in the one poem, as does the insolence of the Suitors in 
the other. In the “ Iliad,” Zeus is the steward of national war — 
Tcquas 7 roAe/xoio ; in the “ Odyssey” the avenger of domestic wrong 
(£enos) ; but in both poems he is equally moral in great cosmical 
matters, and equally immoral, as it strikes us, in certain small per- 
sonal matters. There are no palseozoic and neozoic periods of theo- 
logical belief to warrant the assumption of successive stages of moral 
development in different portions of the Homeric poems. 
At the close of Professor Blackie’s paper, Professor Campbell, St 
Andrews, remarked that before reading the book of Professor Geddes 
he looked upon G rote’s theory with some doubt and suspicion, but 
