parents or relatives. Such practices have alarmed the historian, and, at this stage, we have to meet his susceptibilities. In truth, it must be confessed that the picture revealed by the early writers is not a pleasing one. Probably for this reason, or as much for this reason as any other that has found expression, they have been rejected as the proper ground upon which to found anything like historical truth. The terms "savage" and "barbarian" indulged in by the Greek and Roman writers are rejected by modern authorities as too harsh. They look upon them in the nature of accusations against the standing and position of our ancestors, made by advocates anxious to blacken the national character. Even scholars like Mr. Skene, Mr. Elton, and Professor Rhys, though inclined to weigh these passages by the light of ethnographic research, throw something like doubt upon the exact extent to which they may be taken as evidence. Mr. Elton, though admitting that the early "romances of travel" afford some evidence as to the habits of our barbarian ancestors, cannot quite get as far in his belief as to think that the account of "the Irish tribes who thought it right to devour their parents" is much more than a traveller's tale. Professor Rhys is not quite sure that the account by Cæsar of the communal marriages of the British is "not a passage from some Greek book of imaginary travels among imaginary barbarians which Cæsar had in his mind"; and elsewhere he has similar doubts to express, noteworthy among them being the passage from Pliny which illustrates the Godiva story. Mr. Skene lays stress upon the fact that Tacitus "alludes neither to the practice of their staining their bodies with woad nor to the supposed community of women among them"; and he offers some kind of excuse for the Roman evidence as to the tattooing with representations of animals, evidence which Professor Rhys, too, is chary of accepting in its full sense.
These are the doubts of scholars accustomed to weigh the value of ethnographic evidence. But, in spite of them,
