The following work requires some prefatory notice, to explain the delay in its appearance, to apologise for its shortcomings, and to indicate those friends to whose encouragement and help it owes so much.

The Royal Geographical Society, which had liberally helped the Asia Minor Exploration Fund, required from me a contribution; and from the effort to make the lecture worthy of the audience this book has grown.

In May 1886 the first sketch of it was read before the Society. The difficulty of the subject, and the distraction caused by other work both as a Professor (first in Oxford and afterwards in Aberdeen), and as a traveller (I left London for Smyrna the day after reading the paper, and spent considerable part of the summer of 1886, 1887, and 1888 in Asia Minor), delayed the completion and publication of the sketch. In the beginning of April, 1888, I brought the complete MS. with me to London to hand over to the printer. I discovered, thirty-six hours after starting from Aberdeen, that the manuscript was no longer in the bag where I had placed it, and which had been for most of the time close to my hand, and I have never found the slightest clue to the time or manner of its loss (I have no other reason to suspect myself of somnambulism). At that time the manuscript was about as long as Part I. of the present work. I have found it impossible to rewrite the paper in its original form. All notes for it had been destroyed, and when, after months spent partly in travel and partly in despair, I began to rewrite it, the task proved impossible.