The modern historian cannot, however, be so incidentally treated. He lives in the age of the comparative sciences and of anthropological research. He sometimes uses, though in a half-hearted and incomplete fashion, the results of inquirers in these fields of research, but he nowhere deals with the problem fully. His sins are not general, but special. He agrees with one statement of his original authority and disagrees with another, and we are left with a chaos of opinion founded upon no accepted principle. If the earlier historians accepted or rejected historical records without much reason for either course, the later historians have no right to follow them. The terms "savage" and "barbarian," indulged in by the Greek and Roman writers, cannot be rejected by modern authorities simply because they are too harsh. They cannot be considered merely 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 Sir John 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.[168] Sir John 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,"[169] though he notes elsewhere that "the vocabulary of the Celts will be searched in vain for a word for son or daughter as distinguished from boy or girl" as a fact of no little negative importance in relation to Cæsar's "ugly account;"[170] and he has similar doubts to express, noteworthy among them being the passage from Pliny which illustrates the Godiva story.[171] Mr. Skene lays stress upon the fact that Tacitus "neither alludes 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,[172] evidence which Sir John Rhys, too, is chary of accepting in its full sense. Mr. Pearson reluctantly accepts Cæsar's account of the group marriage and the human sacrifice of the Druids, but he ignores all else, including the attested cannibalism of the Atticotti, though he mentions that tribe in another connection.[173] Sir James Ramsay agrees that the Britons tattooed their bodies with woad, recognises the fact that their matrimonial customs were polyandric, and that brother-and-sister marriage obtained, and generally accepts the prevalent ideas as to Celtic