The historian, however, is inclined to look with suspicion upon historical results which rest upon purely philological evidence. It is not so very long ago since the comparative philologists believed they had restored the early history of the Aryan race. With the help of the dictionary and grammar they had painted an idyllic picture of the life and culture of the primitive Aryan family and traced the migrations of its offshoots from their primeval Asiatic home. But anthropology has rudely dissipated all these reconstructions of primitive history, and has not spared even the Aryan family or the Asiatic home itself. The history that was based on philology has been banished to fairyland. It may be that the historical results based on the complicated and ingenious system of Hexateuchal criticism will hereafter share the same fate. In fact, there is one characteristic of them which cannot but excite suspicion. A passage which runs counter to the theory of the critic is at once pronounced an interpolation, due to the clumsy hand of some later ‘Redactor.’ Thus ‘the tabernacle of the congregation’ is declared to have been an invention of the Priestly Code; and therefore a verse in the First Book of Samuel (ii. 22), which happens to refer to it, is arbitrarily expunged from the text. Similarly passages in the historical books which imply an acquaintance on the part of Solomon and his successors with the laws and institutions of the Priestly Code are asserted to be late additions, and assigned to the very circle of writers to which the composition of the Code is credited. Indeed, if we are to believe the analysts, a considerable part of the professedly historical literature of the Old Testament was written or ‘redacted’ chiefly with the purpose of bolstering up the ideas and inventions either of the Deuteronomist or of the later Code. This is a cheap and easy way of rewriting ancient history, but it is neither scientific nor in accordance with the historical method, however consonant it may be with the methods of the philologist.