f Scotland, and Dr. Joyce
on behalf of Ireland, have their say on the evidence. Mr. Lang seems
to accept Caesar's evidence "if correctly reported," throws doubts upon
the ethnological value of such customs, and declares roundly that to
found theories upon such evidence as archaeology provides "is the
province of another science, not of history."[175] Dr. Joyce says that
in early Greek and Roman writers there is not much reliable
information about Ireland, though he believes them when they talk of
students from Britain residing in Ireland and of books existing in
Ireland in the fourth century.[176]

This meagre result from the historians seems to me to be most
unfortunate. Even when the testimony of early writers is accepted, it
is accepted without the necessary filling in which such an acceptance
warrants. Bare acceptance does not tell us much. Each recorded fact
has a relationship to surrounding facts, should lead us to associated
facts which, escaping observation by early writers, can nevertheless
be restored. In history they are isolated and unconnected, because of
the faults of the historian who records them. Anthropologically they
belong to a wider grouping, reveal a connection with each other which
is otherwise unsuspected, and prepare themselves for treatment on a
larger platform. The historian has used them for the unprofitable
controversy ranging round the question of early Celtic civilisation,
whereas they clearly belong to the history of early man, and even the
folklorist does not disdain to cast them on one side when they do not
suit his purpose.[177]

It is still more unfortunate that Sir Henry Maine should have sought
to enhance the value of his Indian evidence by contrasting it with
what he calls "the slippery testimony concerning savages which is
gathered from travellers' tales,"[178] and that Mr. Herbert Spencer
should have replied to this in an angry note, declaring that he was
aware "that in the eyes of most, antiquity gives sacredness to
testimony, and that so what were travellers' tales when they were
written in Roman days have come in our days to be regarded as of
higher authority than like tales written by recent or living
travellers."[179] The scorn passed upon "travellers' tales," the
application of the term "romance" to the early descriptions of
voyages, have done the same amount of mischief to these early chapters
of history as the constant disbelief in the value of tradition has
done to th