Troy. 253 Duhn, and Virchow took part. After an inquiry as minute and exhaustive as the first had been, these veterans of many archaeological campaigns gave their adhesion in emphatic terms to the theory adopted by us ; Boetticher*s hypothesis of an incineration necropolis was set aside as utterly inadmissible.^ Schliemann triumphed along the whole line. It only wanted, to make his joy complete, to compel his rabid opponent to own himself beaten ; but all that could be wrung out of Boetticher was to declare that he had never intended to accuse Dorpfeld of bad faith, and of intentionally tampering with facts ; he clung to his belief and old affirmation, however, as to mistakes and blunders having frequently been made. Regardless of the fact that the opinion of the intelligent public had declared against his theory, on his return to Germany Boetticher, with cool assurance worthy of a better cause, perhaps too because he had committed him- self too far to recede from his position with the honours of war, reproduced his tentative system, with all its threadbare arguments. To waste more time on an unworthy subject would argue the like unwisdom on our part. Ever since my short stay at Hissarlik in 1890, I find it hard to grasp how, after inspection of the open trenches furrowing the hill on every point of the compass, any one can still believe that all these stupendous accumulations are the result of human ashes, and of buildings raised for funereal purposes. For my part I see in these several stratifications the continuity and movement of human life, only interrupted here and there to take up afresh the thread of its existence, the beginnings of which, however, are lost in the dim past. When we look at the wealth of utensils discovered in the ruins of Hissarlik, when we bend over those tall jars in which the cautious and thrifty husbandman stowed away provisions fated never to be consumed, when in the untouched beds we recognize, here the mark of cross-beams that supported the walls, there the rushes that covered these poor dwellings, when we perceive further the prodigious quantities of shells {cochlce) which served as food to the inhabitants, the image un- consciously rises before our mind's eye of numerous generations, 1 The report of this second Conference may be read in Schliemann and Dorpfeld's Account^ 1890. Virchow has told of his second visit to Hissarlik in Zeitschrift fiir EthnologiCy Verhandlungen^ 1890, under the heading, Reise nach der Troas,
