Edmund Leach, "one of the most impatient critics of Frazer's overblown prose and literary embellishment of his sources for dramatic effect", was scathing of the artistic license exercised by Frazer in "The Golden Bough", saying: "Frazer used his ethnographic evidence, which he culled from here, there and everywhere, to "illustrate" propositions which he had arrived at in advance by "a priori" reasoning, but, to a degree which is often quite startling, whenever the evidence did not fit he simply altered the evidence!"