All Mediterranean peoples, and all sedentary peoples of the European mainland, agree in this, that their adult males have copious hair upon the face. Herodotus and his contemporaries had no means of foreseeing that this was really the exception rather than the rule among human varieties; that neither the yellow- nor the black-skinned races have this appendage except in a rudimentary degree, and in circumstances which suggest contamination more or less direct with the white men of the north-western quadrant of the Old World. Only the fact that the Australians are hairier in face and person even than the whites saves us from the temptation to adopt into anthropology the popular superstition that the long beard is correlated with the superior brain. But for Herodotus and the Greek world, beards on men were the rule, and beardlessness an abnormality to be explained. Now from Homeric times, and before, the Nearer East had been startled by the raids of a warrior people governed and defended by beardless creatures of wondrous horsemanship and archery, their bows in particular such as no mere man could use; inspired, moreover, with a fury like the fury of a woman, against everything that showed a beard. Beyond the Caucasus they ate their prisoners; in Tauris they killed all men, at the bidding of beardless leaders;[98] one band of them penetrated into free Scythia, and were actually taken for women; among their Sarmatian descendants men and women hunted and fought side by side. But they were not confined to the trans-Euxine grassland. In Asia Minor, when King Priam was a lad, they had occupied the plateau, and were resisting the Thraco-Phrygian invasion. Further to the South-East, another body of them had harried all Assyria in the seventh century, and at Askalon their beardless descendants survived. τοῖσι τούτων αἰεὶ ἐκγόνοισι ἐνέσκηψε ὁ θεὸς vήλεαν vοῦσον. The same defect was observable in one element in the male population of Scythia in the fifth century.[99] Here we detect three stages of discovery. First, the beardless people are assumed to be women. Next it is discovered, both in Scythia and in Palestine, that though beardless (and indeed otherwise hairless) they are really men. Thirdly, the collateral discovery that _some_ mounted archers were actually women, as in Sarmatia, is held to reaffirm the legends of Amazons; in spite of the fact that their Sarmatian descendants were known to belong to a bisexual society, and talked a dialect of Scythian. Thus Herodotus and his predecessors were put, after all, on a wrong track, in their inquiry why some Scythians are beardless, and some are not. The test case is at Askalon; where the Scythians who remained were admittedly beardless; and the guess was loosely accepted, that all the bearded ones had escaped the curse and gone away. The outstanding fact is the presence of similar ἀνδρόγυνοι in Scythia itself; and at this point, candid as ever, Herodotus throws the outstanding fact into his reader’s