He suspected that the authoress in describing both Scheria and Ithaca
was drawing from her native country and searched on the Admiralty
charts for the features enumerated in the poem; this led him to the
conclusion that the country could only be Trapani, Mount Eryx, and
the AEgadean Islands. As soon as he could after this discovery he
went to Sicily to study the locality and found it in all respects
suitable for his theory; indeed, it was astonishing how things kept
turning up to support his view. It is all in his book 'The Authoress
of the Odyssey', published in 1897 and dedicated to his friend
Cavaliere Biagio Ingroja of Calatafimi.

His first visit to Sicily was in 1892, in August--a hot time of the
year, but it was his custom to go abroad in the autumn. He returned
to Sicily every year (except one), but latterly went in the spring.
He made many friends all over the island, and after his death the
people of Calatafimi called a street by his name, the Via Samuel
Butler, "thus," as Ingroja wrote when he announced the event to me,
"honouring a great man's memory, handing down his name to posterity,
and doing homage to the friendly English nation." Besides showing
that the 'Odyssey' was written by a woman in Sicily and translating
the poem into English prose, he also translated the 'Iliad', and, in
March, 1895, went to Greece and the Troad to see the country therein
described, where he found nothing to cause him to disagree with the
received theories.

It has been said of him in a general way that the fact of an opinion
being commonly held was enough to make him profess the opposite. It
was enough to make him examine the opinion for himself, when it
affected any of the many subjects which interested him, and if, after