nd in places to forty-six and one-half below this,
before reaching the native soil, how many years did it require to form
a layer of forty to forty-six and one-half feet? The formation of the
uppermost one, the Greek layer of six and one-half feet required 1061.
The time required to cover the foundations of Troy to a depth of
forty-six and one-half feet of _debris_ must have been very long. The
first layer of from thirteen to twenty feet on this hill of Hissarlik
belonged to the Aryan race, of whom very little can be said. The
second layer was formed by the Trojans of Homer, and are supposed, by
Dr. Schliemann and others to have flourished here about 1400 years
before Christ. We have only the general supposition of antiquity that
the Trojan war occurred about B.C. 1200, and Homer's statement that
Dardanus, the first Trojan King, founded Dardania, which town Virgil
and Euripides consider identical with Ilium, and that after him it was
governed by his son Erichthonius, and then by his grandson Tros, by
his great-grandson Ilus, and then by his son Laomedon, and by his
grandson Priam. Even if we allow every one of these six kings a long
reign of thirty-three years, we nevertheless scarcely carry the
foundation of the town beyond 1400 B.C., that is 700 years before the
Greek colony.

During Dr. Schliemann's three-year excavations in the depths of Troy,
he has had daily and hourly opportunities of convincing himself that,
from the standard of our own or of the ancient Greek mode of life, we
can form no idea of the life and doings of the four nations which
successively inhabited this hill before the time of the Greek
settlement. They must have had a terrible time of it, otherwise we
should not find the walls of one house upon the ruined remains of
another, in continuous but _irregular_ succession; and it is just
because we can form no idea of the way in which these nations lived
and what calamities they had to endure, that it is impossible to
calculate the duration of their existence, even approximately, from
the thickness of their ruins. It is extremely remarkable, but
perfectly intelligible from the continual calamities which befel the
town, that the civilization of all the four nations constantly
declined; the terra-cottas, which show continuous _decadence_, leave
no doubt of this.

The first settlement on this hill of _Hissarlik_ seems to have been of
the longest duration, for its ruins cover the rock to a height of from