The past year has not been productive of any momentous discovery, excepting only the bronze statue at Delphi, which will be described more fully in its own place; but a great amount of useful work has been done in various directions, and, indeed, the great variety of what has been achieved may be regarded as the characteristic feature of the year.

Our operations in this island, which lasted in all from March 20th until the end of May, were mainly tentative in character; it contains evidently a large number of ancient sites, but unfortunately, in most of them, a great deal of unsystematic and unrecorded digging has been for a long time carried on. It seemed, therefore, desirable to ascertain, first, whether it would be necessary to continue for more than one season; and, secondly, what sites would best repay investigation.

This excavation was undertaken with a view to determining the position of one of the town-gates. Although there are considerable remains of the fortifications, no gate of the ancient town was visible above ground. It was evident that the discovery of the gates, and consequently of the roads, would afford the best clues to internal and external topography.

Description of the Site.—Melos, as the map shows, possesses one of the finest natural harbours in the Ægean. The ancient town, like the cluster of modern villages, lay on high ground east of the straits by which the nearly landlocked bay is entered.

Sailing in a coasting steamer from Athens to Volo, the traveller passes by the region of land and sea in which the first great scene of the second Persian War was enacted. He enters the Malian Gulf and discerns Thermopylæ in the distance; then he sails through the channel between the Achaian and north Eubœan shores, and as he turns into the Pagasæan basin seeks Aphetæ somewhere on the right, while the shore of Artemisium behind him stretches away towards the open sea.

A visit to the monasteries of Meteora is easier now than in 1834, when Curzon, escorted by a party of “klephts,” reached them from the North. One feels, in reading the account of his rapid passage from Corfu to the valley of the upper Peneus and back again, that it was touch and go in those days. Now the traveller can approach Meteora by the railway, the chief outward and visible sign of improvement in the region assigned to Hellas by the Treaty of Berlin. To any one who has the time to spare I can strongly recommend a week in Thessaly, as it contains several objects of first-rate interest, and is in many respects unlike the rest of Greece. The population is largely Wallachian, and their bronzed shaggy faces suggest the uncomfortable thought, that the veneer of civilisation is even thinner than elsewhere in these parts. It is easy to believe that such a population would like nothing better than frisking into Macedonia in surreptitious bands.

The difficulties that hedged round the Garden of the Hesperides in the Greek seem still destined to make the Cyrenaica, a country to which the eyes of archæologists have so wistfully turned, almost as inaccessible to the modern traveller as to the heroes of ancient fable. The classic maidens have vanished, the Garden is somewhat run to seed, but the dragon of early legend is there, in the person of the native official who guards the historical treasures that lie strewn over the rich sites of the Pentapolis, stately tombs that worthless Arabs kennel in or plunder for statues and vases, to be peddled to Maltese or Greeks for (literally) home consumption or foreign export.

Last May, having to wait for a steamer at Syra, I seized the opportunity and rode out to the prehistoric necropolis on the north-east coast of the island. The distance from the agora of Hermoupolis is only three miles on the map, but nearly an hour and a half by the mule path, which starts from the picturesque upper town and runs along a range of desolate hills, passing on the left a cave which local antiquaries call the cave of Pherekydes.

In this paper I propose, not to give the history of Lesbos, for which the curious may consult well-known books; nor to offer new geographical details, for which I am not qualified; but merely to recount my impressions of the island, its scenery, products, and people; to mention such remains of antiquity as can still be seen there; and, finally, a few interesting relics of ancient custom which the people to this day observe.

In shape, the island resembles the claw of a crab; the two ends of which enclose a wide gulf. The space enclosed would be contained by a triangle, whose S., N.E., and N.W. sides are about 45, 30, and 25 miles respectively. A backbone of rocks runs round the curve, broadening at the two points into wide stretches of hill country, and sinking into a low and fertile plain round the Gulf of Kalloni. The southern claw itself contains a smaller gulf, that of Hiera.

The present population of Melos is collected into six or seven villages in the north-western district, all within a mile or so of the citadel of Kastro. But the whole island is dotted with small churches, some in the existing villages, some on the sites of villages which have disappeared, and others in isolated positions, used only once or twice a year as places of pilgrimage. These churches are interesting in many ways, both as showing the almost Oriental conservatism with which the Greek Church clings to its ancient methods of church-building, and because, although simple in the extreme, they yet possess certain marked differences of structure from the better-known churches of Attica and the mainland, to which, in point of design, they are often superior.

It may safely be said that of no prehistoric city on Hellenic soil are such extensive remains extant above ground as of the Cretan Goulàs. The walls, indeed, are not so massive as those of Tiryns, there is no single monument to fix the attention like the Lions' Gate at Mycenæ, nor has excavation as yet done anything to add to what meets the eye on the surface of the earth. But for the mass of primeval ruins, the still-standing remains of individual dwelling-houses, the number of distinct quarters within the walls and the area they occupy, Goulàs is without a rival. Its site, moreover, with its twin citadel peaks—the northern one looking down over a thousand feet sheer to the valley below—is more commanding than that of any sister city.