But there is other testimony, apart from Cæsar’s, in favour of the view that they were by no means a barbarous people. Diodorus Siculus, who was Cæsar’s contemporary, speaks of them as possessing an integrity of character even superior to that commonly obtaining among the Romans; and Tacitus, writing about a century later, ascribes to them great alertness of apprehension, as well as high mental capacity. Protected as they were by the sea, it is probable that war entered to no large extent into their lives, and they were essentially a pastoral people. The cultured and daring Phoenician traders are certain to have prospected the coast much farther eastward than is recorded, and thus to have materially hastened British advance in civilisation—at least, as far as the southern tribes were concerned. It has been claimed—on what evidence it is difficult to determine—that the Romans, besides teaching the Britons all other arts of manufacture and husbandry, introduced the practice of bee-culture into the conquered isles. But Pliny, giving an account of the voyages of Pytheas, which are supposed to have been undertaken some three hundred years before Cæsar ever set foot here, mentions the Geographer of Marseilles as landing in Britain, and finding the people brewing a drink from wheat and honey. There is, however, another source of testimony on this point, of infinitely greater antiquity than any yet enumerated. Long before the Phoenician sailors discovered their tin-country, there were bards in Eilenban—the White Island—hymning the prowess of their Celtic heroes and the traditional doings of their race. These old wild songs were handed down from singer to singer through the ages, and many of them, still extant among the records of the Welsh bards, must be of unfathomable antiquity. These profess to describe the state of Britain from the very earliest beginnings of the human race. And in some of them, which are seemingly among the oldest, Britain is called the Isle of Honey, because of the abundance of wild bees everywhere in the primæval woods. There would be little profit, and no little folly, in seeking to invest these old traditions with any more than their due significance. But there is much in a name. And it may be conjectured that if Britain was known among the early Druidical bards as the Isle of Honey the natural conditions giving rise to the name were still prevalent, and reflected immemorially in the life of the people, when Cæsar first saw them crowding the white cliffs above him, a huge-limbed, ruddy-locked, war-like race. He records that they possessed their herds of tame cattle and their cultivated fields; and it is reasonable to suppose that the hives of wattled osier that Virgil wrote of a century later had their ancient counterpart of woven basket hives in the British villages of the day.