It is a common occurrence for a series of striking signs and wonderful emotions to precede an epoch-making discovery.  Even the experiment I have just referred to has its own attractive history; but it goes back to a surprisingly ancient era.  Friedrich August Wolf has exactly indicated the spot where Greek antiquity dropped the question.  The zenith of the historico-literary studies of the Greeks, and hence also of their point of greatest importance—­the Homeric question—­was reached in the age of the Alexandrian grammarians.  Up to this time the Homeric question had run through the long chain of a uniform process of development, of which the standpoint of those grammarians seemed to be the last link, the last, indeed, which was attainable by antiquity.  They conceived the Iliad and the Odyssey as the creations of one single Homer; they declared it to be psychologically possible for two such different works to have sprung from the brain of one genius, in contradiction to the Chorizontes, who represented the extreme limit of the scepticism of a few detached individuals of antiquity rather than antiquity itself considered as a whole.  To explain the different general impression of the two books on the assumption that one poet composed them both, scholars sought assistance by referring to the seasons of the poet’s life, and compared the poet of the Odyssey to the setting sun.  The eyes of those critics were tirelessly on the lookout for discrepancies in the language and thoughts of the two poems; but at this time also a history of the Homeric poem and its tradition was prepared, according to which these discrepancies were not due to Homer, but to those who committed his words to writing and those who sang them.  It was believed that Homer’s poem was passed from one generation to another viva voce, and faults were attributed to the improvising and at times forgetful bards.  At a certain given date, about the time of Pisistratus, the poems which had been repeated orally were said to have been collected in manuscript form; but the scribes, it is added, allowed themselves to take some liberties with the text by transposing some lines and adding extraneous matter here and there.  This entire hypothesis is the most important in the domain of literary studies that antiquity has exhibited; and the acknowledgment of the dissemination of the Homeric poems by word of mouth, as opposed to the habits of a book-learned age, shows in particular a depth of ancient sagacity worthy of our admiration.  From those times until the generation that produced Friedrich August Wolf we must take a jump over a long historical vacuum; but in our own age we find the argument left just as it was at the time when the power of controversy departed from antiquity, and it is a matter of indifference to us that Wolf accepted as certain tradition what antiquity itself had set up only as a hypothesis.  It may be remarked as most characteristic of this