400 Proceedings of the Boyal Society 
gist to explain changes, evident to such an eye, which in the 
course of ages may have taken place in the channels of the rivers 
and the structure of their banks since the time of the siege, he 
arrives at the result, that the site of the ancient town was the same 
with that of Strabo’s Novum Ilium. There is a long tongue of 
wide, elevated land, steep on the sides, but not precipitous, which 
stretches from the lower heights of mount Ida for more than two 
miles westward into the very heart of the plain of Troy. The 
western terminal portion of this ridge was the site of Novum 
Ilium ; the ground-plan of which is still indicated by remains of 
walls, and by such an accumulation of broken bricks and shattered 
porcelain all over the surface, that when friends of mine visited the 
place, while in the army medical service at Renkioi Hospital, 
during the late Turkish war, they found it a troublesome matter to 
measure the ground, by pacing through the covering of loose frag- 
ments. Now, it is scarcely to be conceived that, when the people 
of the country, represented by Homer to be well acquainted with 
the art of defensive fortification, determined to erect a fortified 
town for the protection of their territory, they would overlook this 
conspicuous spot, eminently suitable for all the conditions of refuge 
and defence in these early times, and would choose rather a remote 
corner of their land, leaving the whole cultivated plain between it 
and the sea open to sudden piratical incursions. But on other 
grounds than this Mr Maclaren has proved, to the satisfaction of all 
scholars who have studied the subject since, that Troy and Novum 
Ilium must have stood on nearly the same site. I may mention, 
as a new argument in support of that view, that Dr Kirk, one of 
the visitors referred to, found Chevalier’s supposed foundations of an- 
cient walls at Bounarbashi to be really the remains of trap-dykes. 
So far Chevalier has been corrected. But the criticisms of Mac- 
laren do not take away from the light which Chevalier was the first 
to throw over the most interesting of all events described as occur- 
ring in remote secular history. 
Among the literary labours of the Society must be arranged a 
crowd of authentic biographies of the most eminent Scotsmen of 
the time, Fellows of the Society, written by men generally not 
less distinguished than those whom they have commemorated. 
This is a branch of the Proceedings of the Society which it is im- 
