And at the outset it must be premised that, while the study of
primitive man is an essentially inductive science, resting rather
on the accumulation of evidence than on speculation, among the
Greeks it was prosecuted rather on deductive principles.
Thucydides did, indeed, avail himself of the opportunities afforded
by the unequal development of civilisation in his own day in
Greece, and in the places I have pointed out seems to have
anticipated the comparative method. But we do not find later
writers availing themselves of the wonderfully accurate and
picturesque accounts given by Herodotus of the customs of savage
tribes. To take one instance, which bears a good deal on modern
questions, we find in the works of this great traveller the gradual
and progressive steps in the development of the family life clearly
manifested in the mere gregarious herding together of the
Agathyrsi, their primitive kinsmanship through women in common, and
the rise of a feeling of paternity from a state of polyandry. This
tribe stood at that time on that borderland between umbilical
relationship and the family which has been such a difficult point
for modern anthropologists to find.
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