Strabo affirms that it was their custom to cut off the heads of their enemies after a battle, and to hang them on the heads of their horses, or nail them over their doors. While German scholars composed this mosaic out of all the stones that classical writers had ever thrown at the inhabitants of Gaul, French writers retaliated by either throwing discredit on Tacitus, the supposed encomiast of the Germans, or by showing that the account which Tacitus gives of the ancestors of the Teutonic race proves better than anything else that, at his time, the Germans had not yet emerged from a state of the grossest barbarism, and were incapable, therefore, as yet of vices of which they maintain are the outcome of a more advanced state of civilisation. To my mind, apart from any national idiosyncrasies, the description which Tacitus gives us of the Germans, as he had seen them, is perfectly unique and invaluable as a picture of what I should willingly call the life of progressive savages. What should we give if, besides the hymns of the Rig-Veda, we had the accounts of travellers who had actually seen the ancient Rishis of India with their flocks and families, their priests and sacrifices, their kings and battles? What should we give if, besides the Homeric poems, we had the work of an eyewitness who could describe to us the real Troy, and the real fight between Greece and Asia Minor? This is what Tacitus has done for Germany, and at a time when the ancient religion was still living, when the simple laws of a primitive society were still observed, and when the epic poems of a later time were still being sung as ballads at the feasts of half-naked warriors! In Tacitus, therefore, and not in the missionary accounts of Melanesian savages, should we study the truly primitive man, primitive in the only sense in which we shall ever know of primitive man, and primitive certainly in a far truer sense than Papuans or Fuegians are likely to be in the nineteenth century. I cannot understand how an historian like Guizot could have allowed himself to be so much misguided by national prejudice as to speak of Tacitus as a kind of Montaigne or Rousseau, who, in a fit of disgust with his own country, drew a picture of Germany as a mere satire on Roman manners, or to call the _Germania_ “the eloquent sulking of a patriotic philosopher who wishes to see virtue where he does not find the disgraceful effeminacy and the elegant depravity of an old society.” Surely the work of Tacitus cannot have been very fresh in the memory of the great French historian when he delivered this judgment. If Tacitus, like Rousseau or Voltaire, had intended to draw the picture of an ideal barbarism, would he have mentioned the many vices of the German Utopia, the indolence of the Germans, their drunkenness, their cruelty to slaves, their passion for gambling, and their riotous revels? Besides, three-fourths of his book treat of subjects which