" 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 Caesar of the communal marriages of the British is "not a
passage from some Greek book of imaginary travels among imaginary
barbarians which Caesar 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 Caesar'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
Caesar'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
Druidism with its sacrificial rites and the system of "state worship."
He rests his views for much of this upon the anthropological evidence
in support of it.[174] Mr. Lang on behalf o