Why so important, indeed so great, a book as Who
Were the Greeks, by Professor J. L. Myres (Cambridge University Press, 30s.) should be produced in so repellent a form is pre- sumably known to the University of California Press, which is responsible for it. A book of nearly 700 pages does not need to be swelled to 21 inches thick by the use of bulking (and inferior) paper. But room will have to be found for it on the shelves of librarians and serious students of the subject. Professor Myres, in answering the question which he propounds, has drawn on many sources: on the Hittite discoveries, on the Minoan script with the light it throws upon the earlier Cretan civilization, on pottery and, with remarkable discernment and acumen, on folk-memory. The contribution of ancient Greece to civilization usually seems to us the more remarkable because it was E0 concentrated, so set apart from what went before or what came after. The picture is, as it were, a vig- nette in the long panorama of world-history. Yet here we find the links with earlier civilizations and the many proofs that the Greeks, despite the strongly individual character of their culture, were in fact a more than usually hybrid race. And we find all this with such a wealth of learning that the work will be a classic upon the subject for many years to conic.
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