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PREFACE xi
course had not increased the weapons in my armoury before I began my quest. To those occupied with Reform at our older Universities I offer this datum, which is less an opinion than a recorded experience.
For the scope of the treatise, I had originally intended to attempt something more commensurate with its title. But the occupation of learning and teaching other things appears to offer in the immediate future no prospect of prolonged periods of attention to the subject, and a more ambitious work would in all probability get little under way. As it stands the essay is limited to the principles and the origins of the methods of divination practised in ancient Greece. It does not attempt to deal with oracles, though it has something to say of the methods practised at oracular shrines. It is primarily an analysis of method rather than an historical account, and the significance of oracles belongs in reality to a wider investigation of the history of Greek culture and the influence exerted on each other by religious and political institutions.
My debts to my teachers are many. The greatest I owe to Professor Gilbert Murray and Dr. L. R. Farnell of Oxford, and Miss Jane Harrison of Cambridge. Miss Harrison in
