Herodotus, however, was still anything but satisfied as to the paramount value of the physical criterion of kinship. In the majority of cases it proved either too much or too little. A good instance is his comparison of the Colchians with the Egyptians. Here he bases his argument for their affinity on their common physical characters, dark skin and woolly hair. But this proves too much: there are other peoples with dark skin and woolly hair, who are certainly _not_ of Egyptian origin. On the other hand it proves too little; for what he proposes to establish here is not a general community of origin, but direct Egyptian colonization within historic times. For this proof, he prefers to rely on the evidence of a ceremonial custom which he regards as typically African; for it is both Egyptian and Aethiopian; and, as it happens to be a custom involving mutilation of the person, it belongs, as we shall see presently, to a class of observances which were regarded by Greek anthropology as competent to effect real changes of physique in course of time. The merely external evidence of a common industry, such as the linen-weaving which he adduces here, clearly stands for Herodotus on a lower plane, along with their general similarity of culture and language. Clearly Herodotus was not quite satisfied as to the value of racial types in anthropology. And there were several reasons for this. On the one hand, the Greeks themselves held family tradition to be good evidence of common descent; and as a matter of fact, the professional genealogist had been beforehand with the anthropologist at nearly all points within the Greek-speaking world. Traditions of common descent, in fact, were too deeply fixed already in popular belief, and involved too many practical questions, such as the rights to real property, or to political privilege, to be treated as anything but valid evidence of kinship. Consequently a people’s own account of their origin, or whatever story was accepted as such, was held to be evidence of a high order. Such price did Greek science pay for the actual solidarity of Greek phylic institutions.