Ancient Britain and the Invasions of Julius Caesar

The Ethnology of Ancient Britain

I. Introduction

The ethnology of ancient Britain has been studied from many points of view. Writers of a past generation relied simply upon the notices which are to be found in the works of Caesar, Strabo, Tacitus, and other ancient writers. In the last century the science, if it may now be so called, of physical anthropology came into being. The barrows in which our prehistoric ancestors had buried their dead were opened; and the skeletons which had been left in them by earlier explorers were systematically measured. The physical characters of the living population were noted as far as possible in the hope that they might help to solve the problems of the past. Archaeologists collected the pottery, the tools, the weapons, and the ornaments which were found beneath the soil, in the beds of rivers, in barrows, cairns, caves, earthworks, and elsewhere, described them, classified them, and compared them with those of other countries. Philologists studied the forms of the Celtic dialects, and endeavoured to discover in them traces of dialects older still. Finally, folk-lorists formed an association, and joined the army of inquirers. The united efforts of all these seekers after truth have stored up a huge mass of information; and those who may read this article will, I believe, agree with me that there is no reason to expect that any additional facts which may be ascertained will throw much new light upon the questions which we are about to consider:1512 but no serious attempt has yet been made to co-ordinate the materials which exist. To do this is the aim of the present article. If the problems of British ethnology can be solved, history, physical anthropology, archaeology, and philology must combine.

Ii”>the Methods of Anthropology

A lay reader who takes up a treatise on ethnology ought to understand the methods by which anthropologists differentiate the various human types. I may be allowed to reproduce a paragraph which I wrote a few years ago in another volume, and to which I shall have something to add.

‘Anthropologists are obliged to make use of technical terms, more or less uncouth; and they are guided in their observations by very precise and minute rules, framed with the object of eliminating, as far as possible, the chance of error. But it is unnecessary for my purpose to trouble the reader with more than a few of these things. What I shall have to say about stature, complexion, hair and eyes, will need no explanation; and in regard to the skull I shall, as a rule, only have to deal with that measurement which fixes the proportion between its length and its breadth. In this measurement the length is represented by 100; and the proportion which the breadth bears to the length is called the cephalic index. Thus, if the breadth is four-fifths of the length, the index is 80. According to the system formulated by the great French anthropologist, Paul Broca,1513 skulls are grouped, according to the cephalic index, in five classes. Skulls whose index exceeds 83·33 are brachycephalic; those whose index falls between 83·33 and 80 are sub-brachycephalic; those between 80 and 77·77 mesaticephalic; those between 77·77 and 75 sub-dolichocephalic; and those below 75 dolichocephalic... it is necessary to bear in mind that measurements of living heads invariably yield a higher cephalic index—the average difference being as much as 2—than those of skulls1514 [of the same form]. Another important character of the skull or head is gnathism, that is to say, the degree of projection of the upper jaw. The word orthognathous denotes that this projection is comparatively slight; for absolute orthognathism does not exist. The remaining technical terms which it is necessary for general readers to understand are those which describe the structure of the nasal skeleton. Platyrrhinian means that it is wide, mesorrhinian intermediate, and leptorrhinian narrow.’1515 I should have added that the orbital index, which is important, denotes the relation of the breadth of the orbit to its length; and, since we are dealing with the ethnology of Britain, it will be convenient to adopt for cephalic indices the notation which is prevalent in this country, and according to which skulls whose indices exceed 80 are called brachycephalic, those between 80 and 75 mesaticephalic, and those under 75 dolichocephalic.

The value of the cephalic index was for many years taken for granted in all ethnological treatises; and many anthropologists still lay great stress upon it.1516 But there has lately been a reaction.1517 Professor Sergi1518 scoffs at ‘the old and discredited method of the cephalic index, which only indicates artificial and conventional distinctions’, and tells us that ‘it is the forms alone that we have to take into consideration’,1519 and that ‘indices may serve to approximate the most diverse forms and to separate the most homogeneous’.1520 This last remark is unquestionably true; as Huxley said, ‘in nine cases out of ten you may diagnose an Australian skull [among other dolichocephalic skulls] with certainty.’1521 Nevertheless the cephalic index, used with discrimination, retains the value which Broca, Beddoe, Collignon, Turner, and other anthropologists ascribe to it; and those who are familiar with Sergi’s writings will not be surprised to learn that, when it suits his purpose, he lays great stress upon the distinction between dolichocephalic and brachycephalic skulls.1522 He considerably modifies his view when he affirms the truism that ‘we cannot accept the evidence of the cephalic index when that evidence is contradicted by other important facts’;1523 but if any one who has a taste for ethnology will spend a few days in walking through the department of Jura or the mountainous parts of Auvergne, the contrast between the round heads which he will see everywhere and the totally different type which he has been accustomed to in his own country will convince him that the cephalic index has been ‘discredited’ in vain.1524 Anthropologists are, however, becoming convinced that the labour which has been spent upon calculating the averages of tables of widely different indices has borne little fruit.1525

When we consider the cranial forms, apart from measurements, we find the same lack of unanimity. According to Sergi,1526 ‘the norma verticalis, or view from above,’ is ‘the most important of all’. According to Rolleston,1527 ‘the norma lateralis, or profile view of a skull is the most important.’ The present tendency, however, of British anthropologists is to follow the Italian professor.

The evidence of skulls will often mislead unless it is used with caution and discernment, reinforced by collateral knowledge. Certain British brachycephalic skulls of the Bronze Age closely resemble in many respects those of the Maoris.1528 Rolleston, remarking on the likeness between a dolichocephalic skull of the Bronze Age from Weaverthorpe and the famous Engis skull, observes that ‘resemblances so strong... should, as they are also so widely scattered over the globe, make us careful not to speak as to the ethnological affinities of any skulls, until we have a very considerable number of representatives of both objects of comparison to place alongside of each other; and it may be added until we have also succeeded in bringing other lines of evidence to bear upon the question’.1529

Besides the various characters of the skull and face, and, when they can be ascertained, the complexion, and the colour of the hair and eyes, ethnologists have to take account of stature, because, although it partly depends upon food and social environment,1530 it unquestionably varies in different races. Now the stature of prehistoric men, when their skeletons are found, can only be estimated by calculating the relations between the lengths of certain bones and the actual height of the individual; and since these relations are obviously variable, the calculation can only lead to approximately true results. The error would no doubt be insignificant if the average relations were certain; but various anthropologists have adopted various methods of calculation, which have led to widely different results.1531 The most satisfactory, for our purpose,1532 appears to be that of Dr. Beddoe,—‘I take away from the length of the femur [or thigh-bone] one-quarter of the excess over 13 inches up to 19, and thereafter only one-eighth, and then multiply by four’.1533

III. Eolithic Man(?)

Much controversy was excited in the last decade of the nineteenth century by the announcement that stone implements, ruder than the rudest of the Palaeolithic Age, had been discovered on the plateau between the Medway and Caterham valleys: but even if it were possible to convince sceptics that some of these flints were wrought by men’s hands, the proof would not affect the present inquiry; for we should have no means of ascertaining to what race (supposing that it differed from that of the earlier palaeolithic hunters) those men belonged.1534

IV. Palaeolithic Man

1. The people who inhabited this island in the Old Stone Age appear to have been confined to the south; for no palaeolithic implement has yet been found further north than Lincoln, or, as some maintain, the East Riding of Yorkshire.1535 An attempt has indeed been made to prove that such tools were used in Scotland;1536 but the best judges are unanimously of opinion that the contention has not been established.1537

Little direct evidence exists as to the physical type of the palaeolithic inhabitants of Britain. Only four human skulls have been found in England which can be referred to that period,—one at Galley Hill, near Swanscombe,1538 one at Westley, near Bury St. Edmunds,1539 and two in the Cattedown cave near Plymouth:1540 but it is not certain that the first was contemporaneous with the beds which contained it:1541 of the second only fragments remained from which it was impossible to determine the contour;1542 and the others could not be removed entire. Almost all the older palaeolithic skulls, however, which have been discovered in Western Europe belong apparently to the same race,1543 which may have been represented among the hunters who entered Britain when it still formed part of the Continent. Indeed the Galley Hill skull, whether it belonged to a palaeolithic man or not, has certain characteristics of the most famous representative of the race,—the Neanderthal skull, which was discovered about the middle of the last century in the valley of the Neander in Rhenish Prussia.1544 The skulls of this type are extraordinarily dolichocephalic; and the people to whom they belonged had extremely low and retreating foreheads, heavy and projecting lower jaws, and amazingly prominent brow ridges, and were short, big-boned, and muscular.1545

But what if the Neanderthal skull was not human? If that poor creature had but known how famous he, or it, was to become! His broken cranium has a bibliography of its own. Virchow, who, however, late in life changed his mind, at one time regarded it as abnormal,—pathological. Huxley and Broca vigorously defended its respectability; and at the end of the nineteenth century the most eminent anthropologists of Europe and America accepted it as the type of the most ancient of the known races of men. But in 1901 a German anthropologist, Dr. G. Schwalbe, wrote an article of appalling length,1546 which disturbed settled convictions. Huxley had pronounced the Neanderthal to be the most ape-like of all known human skulls: Schwalbe refused to regard it as human, in the accepted sense, at all. For him it represents a distinct species, intermediate between the Pithecanthropus of Java—the famous ‘missing link’, whose remains were discovered a few years ago by Dr. Dubois—and man himself. In the same class Schwalbe places the skulls of Spy, which have always been grouped along with that of Neanderthal; and he insists that all the human palaeolithic skulls of Europe, however closely they may appear to resemble these, are in reality different.1547 ‘In the Neanderthal skull,’ says Dr. Laloy, in a lucid summary of Schwalbe’s article, which will satisfy all who are not specialists, ‘the greatest length coincides with the “inio-glabellar” diameter,’ that is to say, the diameter measured from the space between the supraciliary, or brow, ridges and the sinus at the back of the neck: this, he adds, is never the case in man. No, not in man as we know him. But what sense are we to attach to the word ‘human’? Was there ever a creature of whom it could be affirmed that he was the first man?1548

Ten or twelve skulls, which, in dolichocephaly and prominence of the supraciliary ridges, resemble those of the Neanderthal type, but, unlike them, have high foreheads, and are said to have belonged to tall men, have lately been found associated with tools of Mousterian form,1549 at Krapina in Northern Croatia.1550 Fourteen skeletons, which may evidently be assigned to the same group, have been found at Předmost in Moravia,1551 and another at its capital, Bruenn.1552

But the Palaeolithic Age, in Britain as in other parts of Europe, was of such immense duration that it would be absurd to assume that it had no other representatives than men of the Neanderthal type; and the ‘artists’ of the latest period, whose creations have been discovered in the caves of La Madelaine and Les Eyzies,1553 belonged to a different race, represented by skulls discovered at Laugerie-Basse and Chancelade in the valley of the Lozère. While these skulls are hardly less dolichocephalic than those of the Neanderthal type, they are in other respects strikingly different, being much more capacious, and having high and broad foreheads, and brow ridges which are hardly perceptible.1554 Although no skulls of this kind have been found in our own country, it is not improbable that men of the stock to which they belonged penetrated into Britain; for in one of the caves of Creswell Crags in Derbyshire there has been found a bone engraved with the figure of a horse’s head,1555 which reminds one of the spirited designs of the artists of the Dordogne, and was associated with implements of the kind which have been found in the caves of La Madelaine and Les Eyzies and others of the Dordogne basin.1556

The recent systematic exploration of the Baoussé-Roussé caves near Mentone is of the highest importance because it has demonstrated an intimate connexion between palaeolithic and neolithic races in Southern France. All the interments have been proved to be palaeolithic.1557 The newest skeleton in the Grotte des Enfants approximates to the dolichocephalic type of the Neolithic Age.1558 Beneath it, 5 metres 15 millimetres lower down, lay a gigantic skeleton, closely resembling but far older than that of the famous ‘old man’ of Cro-Magnon, which is commonly assigned to the earliest neolithic times, but may possibly be as old as the period that in France is recognized as transitional.1559 This skeleton has certain negroid characteristics,1560 which, however, are more pronounced in the two most ancient skeletons of the Grotte des Enfants, discovered 70 millimetres lower still and associated with the bones of a rhinoceros.1561 M. Verneau argues that the prognathism which appears in certain skeletons of Western Europe of the early Bronze Age was connected by atavism with these primitive denizens of the Riviera.1562

2. Professor Boyd Dawkins draws a sharp distinction between ‘the River-drift men’ and ‘the Cave-men’. I must remark that the term ‘Cave-men’ is not happily chosen; for the professor himself assures us that ‘the Cave-men did not always use caves’, and that ‘the habit of camping in the open air must have been the rule... because caverns and rock-shelters are only met with in very limited areas’;1563 while on the other hand he points out that ‘River-drift men’ often lived in caves.1564 By ‘the Cave-men’ he means those who made implements of what he terms ‘the higher types’, that is, the types which are called after the caves of Le Moustier, Solutré, and La Madelaine. Observing that there were ‘Cave-men’ not only in our own country and in France, but also in Belgium, Switzerland, and Germany, he argues that ‘from this distribution of the implements it is evident that the Cave-man belongs neither to the southern group of the Pleistocene animals nor to the temperate which found its way over the mountain barriers into Spain, Italy, and Greece. On the other hand,’ he continues, ‘the River-drift man must be considered as a member either of the temperate or southern fauna of Europe, because his remains are met with in the regions of the Mediterranean, north [and also south] of those mountain barriers.’1565

Granting that no implements of the higher types have been discovered in caves south of the ‘mountain barriers’, it is hardly safe to conclude that the ‘Cave-men’ did not belong either to the southern or the temperate group of mammals.1566 The question is whether the implements to which the professor refers were characteristic of one palaeolithic race to the exclusion of others. Assuming that such implements do not exist outside the area in which they have been found—a very rash assumption—it does not follow that the men who made them belonged to a race different from their contemporaries whose tools have been discovered in the drift. Only one interment of the Late Celtic Period has been found in Scotland, and that quite recently;1567 yet there were numerous Celts then in North as well as in South Britain.

The professor also insists1568 that ‘the absence of the higher types of implement in the camping-places of the River-drift men cannot be accounted for on the ground that they are smaller or... more perishable’; for, he says, ‘camping-places of the Cave-men have been met with in France [for instance at Solutré]... in which the implements are associated in the same manner as in the caves’.

I reply, first, that it is begging the question to say that the men who encamped at Solutré were ‘Cave-men’ as distinct from ‘River-drift men’; secondly, that implements of Le Moustier type, which were characteristic of the earliest French ‘Cave-men’,1569 are common both in France and Britain in the river-drift;1570 and thirdly, with due deference to the professor, that the absence ‘of the higher types of implement’ from the river-drift is as easily explicable as the absence of implements of bone or wood:—partly they were more perishable and would be more difficult to find, and partly they were less likely to be used in the field.1571 Besides, is it not possible that none of the very few palaeolithic ‘camping-places’ that have been found in this country belonged to the Solutrean period? As we have seen, the professor himself affirms that ‘the Cave-men’ encamped as a rule not in caves but in the open air: they, like ‘the River-drift men’ were, as he himself assures us, hunters: why then have hardly any of their ‘higher types of implement’ been found in this country in the field? Simply for the reasons which I have given. And since ‘the Cave-men’, like ‘the River-drift men’, lived commonly in the open air, how could the latter, even if they belonged to a different race, have escaped the influence of the former or have failed to acquire their culture? And how could the two races have escaped amalgamating?

The ‘Cave-men’, as Professor Boyd Dawkins himself admits,1572 undoubtedly used certain implements of river-drift type as well as ‘the higher types’; nor is there any reason to suppose that the ‘River-drift men’ did not use implements of ‘the higher types’ as well as implements of river-drift type, except the fact, easily accounted for, that the former are not found in the drift. Professor Boyd Dawkins himself strenuously maintains that ‘River-drift men’ as well as ‘Cave-men’ lived in caves.1573 How then can he prove that the two sets of occupants were ethnologically different? He insists that ‘the river-drift implements in the Caves of Creswell Crags, of Kent’s Hole, and of the Grotte de l’Église, are found in the strata below those with the implements of the Cave-men, and consequently that the River-drift men lived in Britain and France before the Cave-men.’1574 But on his own showing the owners of both sets of implements did live in caves; and so far nothing is proved except that those who used one set were more ancient than those who used the other. ‘Some caves also,’ he adds, ‘were inhabited by River-drift men, who have left behind their implements without any trace of the higher types of the Cave-men.’1575 But here again nothing is proved save that these particular ‘River-drift men’ had not yet learned to make ‘the higher types’. The professor might have a good case if he could say, River-drift implements have been found in the lower strata of caves: in the upper strata none have been found, but only ‘the higher types’; consequently the men who used the higher types were quite different from those of the later Palaeolithic Age whose implements have been recovered from river-drift. But this he could not truly say; for implements of river-drift type have been found, although rarely, in the highest strata of caves.1576 Lastly, I would ask the professor, who insists that ‘the Cave-men’ were ‘northern mammals’, and that they did not enter Europe until long after the appearance of ‘the River-drift men’, to tell us whence they came.

3. Are we to count the palaeolithic inhabitants of Britain among our ancestors? ‘I do not consider,’ says Dr. Garson, ‘that there is any evidence of the existence of the direct descendants of Palaeolithic man among the osteological remains of Neolithic or subsequent date in Britain.’1577 On the other hand, Dr. Beddoe1578 thinks that the oldest inhabitants of this country may have left descendants, whom he is inclined to identify with ‘some Mongoloid race’, traces of which, he believes, are discernible in the population of the west of England; while two distinguished French anthropologists, MM. de Quatrefages and Hamy, affirm that the Neanderthal race ‘has left a permanent imprint on the population of the three kingdoms’,1579 and refer to various skulls of the Neolithic and later periods which resemble more or less closely that of Neanderthal.1580 Moreover, it is generally admitted that even at the present day a few individuals here and there belong to the same type.1581 But it does not follow that these persons or those to whom Dr. Beddoe and M. Hamy refer were descended from men who lived in Britain in the Palaeolithic Age. That palaeolithic man left no descendants in any part of the world is of course not maintained even by the most ardent supporters of the theory of the ‘Hiatus’: somewhere or other there must have been a link; but Sir John Evans, as I have observed in the first part of this book,1582 argues from the supposed absence of intermediate forms of implements that it did not exist in this country; and Dr. Keane1583 thinks that ‘the few scattered palaeolithic hunters could scarcely have lived through the last ice-age in a contracted region at one time reduced by subsidence to a mere cluster of islets’, &c. The answer is, first that there is no reason to believe that in ‘the last ice-age’ or at any time between the dawn of the latest palaeolithic period and the arrival of neolithic man Britain was ‘a mere cluster of islets’;1584 and secondly that, as Professor Boyd Dawkins assures us, out of forty-eight species of mammalian fauna living in Britain in the Palaeolithic, thirty-one survived in the Neolithic Age.1585 Professor Boyd Dawkins, however, insists that ‘the mere contrast between the Palaeolithic and wild Neolithic faunas implies a zoological break of the first magnitude’.1586 I take leave to say that it implies no break at all, seeing that thirty-one of the older species confessedly lived on: it implies no more than is implied by the disappearance of the urus, the wolf, the wild boar, and many other animals which were living in this island at a time since which it has been continuously inhabited by man. The professor triumphantly points out that in those caves which were successively used as dwellings by palaeolithic and neolithic people ‘the remains of the domestic animals are found alone in the upper Prehistoric [or neolithic] strata.’1587 Undoubtedly. But what then? The fact does not prove that palaeolithic man had become extinct when neolithic man arrived: it merely proves that the latter had domestic animals, and that the former had not. Arab horses, Siamese cats, and many other animals have been introduced into this country since the Christian era: yet the people who were here before their introduction did not become extinct. And if ‘in a great many cases the lower Palaeolithic strata [in caves] are sealed down, and mapped off from the Neolithic, by a layer of stalagmite’,1588 that only proves ‘a break of continuity between the two periods’ as far as those caves are concerned. The Palaeolithic Age, says the professor, ‘was continental, the Neolithic insular in North-Western Europe.’1589 He means that in the Palaeolithic Age Great Britain was an outlying part of the Continent, and that the neolithic invaders had to sail across the Channel.1590 But why should the formation of the Channel have extinguished the palaeolithic race? ‘There is obviously,’ continues the professor, ‘a great gulf fixed between the rude hunter civilisation of the one and the agricultural and pastoral civilisation of the other.’ Obviously. But the gulf is not more obvious than that which separated the civilization of the Red Indians from the civilization of the Pilgrim Fathers. Yet the Red Indians still lived on.

It is true that if the professor has failed to show that the Palaeolithic Age in Britain was abruptly terminated, he has no difficulty in disposing of certain arguments which have been adduced to show that it was not. When, for instance, Mr. Allen Brown points to the implements of palaeolithic type which were found in the refuse heaps of the neolithic settlement at Cissbury in Sussex, he replies that ‘in the vast accumulation of refuse, representing every style in the chipping, from the rough block of flint... to the highly finished axe, broken... by an unhappy blow, it is obvious that there must be some which would represent well-known Palaeolithic types.’1591 Nevertheless it remains true that not one of the facts which he has stated is inconsistent with the hypothesis that men may have lived on in Britain in the palaeolithic stage of culture until the time when the first neolithic immigrants arrived. What his opponents suggest is that certain types of palaeolithic implements survived into the Neolithic Age;1592 in other words, that implements of those types continued to be manufactured or used then. That this was the case in Ireland is certain;1593 and, since there is no evidence of a Palaeolithic Age in Ireland, it seems not unreasonable to conjecture that they were made by descendants of palaeolithic refugees from Britain or Gaul. Mr. Allen Brown may be wrong in maintaining that implements which he has found ‘at or near the surface’ at East Dean in Sussex are ‘mesolithic’, that is, belong to a period of transition;1594 but Sir John Evans himself says1595 of some of the implements, usually classed as palaeolithic, which have been found in the cave earth of the famous Kent’s Cavern in a position which authorizes us to assume that the people to whom they belonged were not separated by any ‘hiatus’ from the palaeolithic race whose remains were found immediately underneath, that ‘so far as form is concerned, there is little or nothing to distinguish them from the analogous implements of the Neolithic Period’. Is it not possible that these and some of the ruder implements which have hitherto been classed as neolithic may have been fabricated not by neolithic immigrants but, after their immigration, by descendants of the palaeolithic race?1596 Those who deny that mesolithic implements have been found in Britain deny also that they have been found anywhere else. Granted for the sake of argument. But if their general absence does not weaken the certainty that the supposed hiatus was not universal, how can their absence in Britain prove that there was a hiatus here? In Part I I have shown that it is impossible to frame any theory which shall account satisfactorily for the assumed disappearance of British palaeolithic man. Professor Boyd Dawkins asks us to believe that the ‘Cave-men’ fled in terror before the neolithic invaders and eventually settled in Greenland, where they became the ancestors of the Eskimos; and in support of this theory he assures us that ‘Palaeolithic man appeared in Europe with the arctic mammalia, lived in Europe along with them, and disappeared with them’; that the gloves of the ‘Cave-men’ were ‘similar to those now used by the Eskimos’; that their implements ‘are of the same kind as those of the Eskimos’; that, like the Eskimos, they did not take the trouble to bury their dead; and that ‘the most astonishing bond of union between the Cave-men and the Eskimos is the art of representing animals’.1597 Judging from the specimens of Eskimo art which the professor gives, I confess that what I find astonishing is its inferiority to that of the Cave-men;1598 there is no evidence that the Cave-men of Britain wore gloves; and if they did, may not the reason have been, not that there was any connexion between them and the Eskimos, but that their hands were cold? Is the professor sure that ‘the River-drift men’ did not also wear gloves? We do not know whether palaeolithic man appeared in Europe with the arctic mammalia: he certainly did not accompany them from the north; and it is an article of faith with French anthropologists that he did not disappear with them, but became the ancestor of neolithic man. There is a general resemblance between the palaeolithic drift implements of all countries; and in the earlier part of this volume many facts have been noted which show how cautious one should be in inferring identity of race from similarity in implements, weapons, or ornaments. There is not the slightest evidence that ‘the Cave-men’ did not bury their dead; and there is irrefragable evidence, as we have seen, that cave-men in the Riviera and in Croatia did.1599 Again, since the professor differentiates the ‘Cave-men’ from the ‘River-drift men’ of Britain, can he prove that the latter did bury their dead? If not, what becomes of his argument? Finally, the theory that the Eskimos are descendants of ‘the Cave-men’ of Western Europe has been rejected by every recent inquirer.1600

How does Professor Boyd Dawkins account for the disappearance, which he assumes, of palaeolithic man? ‘Simply,’ he says, ‘by assuming that at the close of the Pleistocene age, when they came into contact with Neolithic invaders, there were the same feelings between them as existed in Hearne’s times between the Eskimos and the Red Indian, terror and defenceless hatred being, on the one side, met by ruthless extermination on the other. In this way the Cave-men would be gradually driven from Europe.’1601 That men who were ruthlessly exterminated should have survived to become the ancestors of the Eskimos is certainly remarkable. But seriously I would ask the professor whether he has really succeeded in persuading himself that ‘the Cave-men’ were one and all either exterminated or driven out of Europe. Did none remain? He assures us that ‘the Cave-men’ migrated eastward; and he still insists, in defiance of all French craniologists, that ‘neither of the two races of Palaeolithic man have left behind any marks in the existing population of Europe’.1602 How they contrived to make their slow progress across the Continent without leaving one descendant is a problem which he does not attempt to solve. And since he himself admits, or rather affirms, that they ‘came into contact with Neolithic invaders’, it is difficult to see how he can maintain the existence of a hiatus.

The professor has asserted that there is ‘no evidence in any part of the world of a continuity between the Palaeolithic and Neolithic ages’.1603 Yet he of course admits that it must have existed somewhere. Good reasons have been given for believing that it existed in France.1604 Why not also in Britain?1605

Such are the reasons by which I endeavour to justify myself in refusing to believe that neolithic man, when he entered Britain, found none to welcome or to oppose him save the thirty-one species of mammalian fauna which Professor Boyd Dawkins has spared.

V. The Pygmies (?)

British pygmies are the creation of Celtic imagination. The evidence on which we are required to believe that they existed is this. Professor Rhys1606 suggests that the name of the Coritani, a tribe mentioned by Ptolemy,1607 who inhabited the country between the Trent and the Nen, is related to the word cor, a dwarf. ‘Then,’ the professor concludes, ‘we should have accordingly to suppose the old race to have survived so long and in such numbers that the Celtic lords of Southern Britain called the people of that area by a name meaning dwarfs.’ Afterwards, referring to various articles by Mr. David MacRitchie, he observes that in certain parts of Wales and Scotland there are mounds enclosing cells, which are ‘frequently so small as to prove beyond doubt that those who inhabited them were of remarkably small stature’;1608 and he finds in Welsh, Irish, and Scotch folk-lore traditions which confirm him in the belief that these cells were inhabited by dwarfs, whom he calls ‘the Mound Folk’. ‘This strange people,’ he tells us, ‘seems to have exercised on the Celts... a sort of permanent spell of mysteriousness and awe stretching to the verge of adoration... the Celt’s faculty of exaggeration, combined with his incapacity to comprehend the weird and uncanny population of the mounds and caves... has enabled him... to bequeath to the great literatures of Western Europe a motley train of dwarfs,’1609 &c. The professor’s conclusion1610 is that the earliest people who inhabited these islands [apparently after the Palaeolithic Age] were ‘the mound folk, consisting of the short swarthy people variously caricatured by our fairy tales’; and that they were conquered by neolithic invaders, who, he tells us, ‘made slaves and drudges of the mound-haunting race.’

‘These,’ the professor warns us, perhaps superfluously, ‘are conjectures which I cannot establish; but possibly somebody else may.’

I venture to hint a doubt. Not only is the derivation of Coritani utterly uncertain,1611 but it is safe to assume that the Celtic tribe who undoubtedly conquered the country which belonged in Ptolemy’s time to the Coritani would not have called its population, themselves included, by a name which described not even the people whom they found in possession, but the ‘slaves and drudges’ of that people, or rather of their neolithic predecessors! The professor indeed argued in Celtic Folk-Lore1612 that the Coritanian dwarfs ‘may be conjectured to have had quiet from invaders from the Continent because of the inaccessible nature of their fens’. How then did they themselves and the non-dwarfish invaders of the Bronze Age get there? It is almost superfluous to remark that in the year before and in the year after the publication of Celtic Folk-Lore the professor counted the Coritani among the Brythonic ‘invaders from the Continent’.1613 The ‘mound-dwellings’ which Mr. MacRitchie describes1614 belong to the class of structures which are popularly known as ‘Picts’ houses’, ‘Earth-houses’, or ‘Weems’, and are immeasurably later than the period to which Professor Rhys’s theory would compel him to assign them. The mere fact, indeed, that many of them have been shown by excavation to have been occupied in Roman times does not prove that they were not constructed earlier; but I can find no evidence that any of them belong even to the Neolithic Age. Mr. MacRitchie himself assures us that one which was opened at Crichton in Mid-Lothian ‘was proved to have been built not earlier than 80 A.D.’;1615 and he assigns the ‘mound-dwellings’ in general not to a pre-neolithic race but to the Picts of historic times.1616 He also says that one which was explored in 1855 contained four chambers, of which the largest was ‘6 feet 2 inches long, 4 feet 6 inches in height, and 2 feet 6 inches wide’, and, with a fascinating lack of humour, he adds that ‘while the size of the stones used in its construction is evidence of great personal strength on the part of the builders, the small and narrow rooms seem to indicate a diminutive race.’1617 When the reader is invited to believe that ‘those who inhabited’ these ‘rooms’, which were only built by the exertion of ‘great personal strength’, ‘were of remarkably short stature’, he falls to calculating whether even a race of Tom Thumbs, each of whom possessed the muscular power of a Sandow, would not have used their strength to make their rooms a little more comfortable.1618 Mr. MacRitchie shows more acumen when, after remarking that ‘two alleged Fairy Knowes in Shetland’ proved on investigation to be natural hillocks, and that another in Stirlingshire ‘was only a sepulchral mound’, he concludes that these instances are ‘sufficient to show the unreliable nature of popular tradition’.1619 If it was ‘the Celt’s faculty of exaggeration’ that ‘enabled him to bequeath to the great literatures of Western Europe a motley train of dwarfs’, why should he not have exercised his faculty upon the comparatively short neolithic population rather than upon the imaginary pygmies whom Professor Rhys has appointed as their ‘slaves and drudges’?1620 And if the imagination which created ‘a motley train of dwarfs’ had pygmies for its basis of fact, will the professor tell us who were the originals of the ‘motley train’ of giants whom the imaginations of various European peoples associated with the dwarfs?1621 I am aware that Professor Kollmann1622 claims to have proved that pygmies existed in prehistoric times in France, Germany, Switzerland, and other European countries; but the fact remains that no evidence has been produced that a race of pre-neolithic or even prehistoric pygmies existed in this country save only that which is furnished by ‘the Celt’s faculty of exaggeration’.

VI. Neolithic Man

The remains of neolithic man have been discovered in caves, in cairns, in submerged forests, and in barrows in Essex, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, Somersetshire, Derbyshire, Staffordshire, Yorkshire, Caermarthenshire, Denbighshire, the Isle of Man,1623 Argyllshire and the island of Arran, Caithness, and the Orkney Islands.1624 The neolithic population, however, it need hardly be said, were scattered over many other parts of Britain in which their skeletons have not come to light. Many anthropologists consider that all of them belong to one race; but at all events the great majority represent men of medium stature with long skulls; and it is a generally accepted article of faith that no long barrow has ever yielded any article of metal in association with a primary interment, and that no skull whose cephalic index exceeded 79, belonging to a primary interment, has ever been found in a long barrow since the time when anthropologists first began to measure skulls in this country.1625 According to a table1626 published by Dr. Beddoe in 1894, the value of which has been confirmed by later measurements,1627 the cephalic indices of 87 skulls belonging to the Neolithic Age ranged from 63 to 79; and, as Dr. Thurnam points out,1628 some of them are more dolichocephalic than those of any modern European people.

When we come to examine the stature of the neolithic Britons, we find that, according to Thurnam’s latest estimate,1629 the average height of 25 male skeletons found by him in long barrows was 5 feet 5.4 inches,1630 or 1 metre 661: but Dr. Beddoe gives good reasons, to which I have already called attention,1631 for believing this estimate to be too low; and his own is 5 feet 6.7 inches, or 1 metre 694.1632 Recent measurements (although they include those of individuals under 5 feet) do not invalidate the evidence of these figures;1633 and the few Scottish skeletons which undoubtedly belong to the Neolithic Age have yielded practically the same results.1634

Dr. Garson, describing the dolichocephalic Long Barrow skulls, with which anthropologists agree in associating those that have been found in the ‘horned cairns’ of Caithness,1635 in the neolithic cairns of the isle of Arran,1636 and in the caves of Oban,1637 says that ‘the superciliary ridges and glabella [the surface between the superciliary ridges] are moderately or even feebly developed... the malar [or cheek] bones are never prominent... there is no tendency to prognathism... as a whole the face is oval in form; the jaws are small and fine... the facial characters are mild and without exaggerated development in any direction’.1638 It may be added that the Long Barrow skulls, as Thurnam pointed out, are ‘more or less depressed—platycephalic’,1639 and that the nose is usually aquiline.

The general truth of the foregoing descriptions will be apparent to any one who examines the plates in Crania Britannica; but we must take account of exceptions. As Dr. Davis pointed out,1640 a skull found in the Long Lowe barrow, near Wetton in Staffordshire, is very different from another dolichocephalic skull from a chambered long barrow at Uley in Gloucestershire.1641 In the latter the brow ridges are strongly marked, and the chin is comparatively broad and square.1642 Of another skull, found in a barrow near Littleton Drew in North Wiltshire, Thurnam observes that the lower jaw is ‘thick and heavy’.1643 A third, taken from a barrow at West Kennet in North Wiltshire, has an amazingly angular and square lower jaw, which, as Thurnam truly says, ‘deviates considerably from the normal type.’1644

Again, while the average stature of the Long Barrow skeletons which Thurnam examined was, according to the higher estimate of Dr. Beddoe, only 5 feet 6·7 inches,1645 and Rolleston affirmed that he had ‘never found the stature to exceed 5 feet 6 inches... in any skeleton from a barrow which was undoubtedly of the stone and bone period’,1646 a skeleton found in the West Kennet barrow had a thigh bone 20 inches long;1647 and its possessor would therefore have stood 6 feet high, or nearly 1 metre 830, on the lowest computation, and, according to the estimate of Dr. Beddoe, 6 feet 1½ inch or 1 metre 867. Not less remarkable is a dolichocephalic skeleton of almost identical dimensions,1648 described by Dr. Garson, which, although it was found in a round barrow, undoubtedly belonged to the Neolithic Age.1649

It is evident, therefore, that although not one of the people, so far as we can tell, who buried their dead in long barrows was brachycephalic in index, yet not only was there a very wide range in their indices, but some of them were strikingly different, both in form of skull and feature and in stature, from the normal type. Were they the result of crossing between individuals of the Long Barrow race and tall brachycephalic invaders who will be noticed later? Thurnam himself pointed out that a male skull, whose cephalic index was 79, found in a primary interment in the long barrow of Charlton Abbot’s in Wiltshire, was ‘unquestionably brachycephalous’.1650 The mere fact that its index was below the conventional limit did not blind him to its true character.

Let us now see how far those skulls of the Neolithic Age which have been found in other surroundings resemble the type which is associated with long barrows.

Putting aside the Scottish skulls which have been already mentioned, they comprise specimens found in the caves of Perthi-Chwareu in Denbighshire and Cefn, near St. Asaph; in a chambered cairn at Tyddyn Bleiddyn, near Cefn; in caves at Rhosdigre and Llandebie, and at Uphill in Somersetshire;1651 in the East Ham Marshes, along with two ‘chipped celts’, fifteen feet below the surface;1652 in the bed of the Trent at Muskham;1653 and in a submarine forest, thirty feet below the level of the sea, near the Land’s End.1654 Skulls found in tumuli at Keiss in Caithness,1655 in a tumulus at Towyn-y-Capel in Anglesey,1656 and in ‘what seems to be an alluvial deposit formed by the river Dove’, near Ledbury Hall in Derbyshire,1657 may be added doubtfully to the list;1658 but, as we shall afterwards see,1659 there need be no doubt that certain brachycephalic skulls of the type which is commonly associated with the round barrows belonged to the Neolithic Age.

Professor Ripley1660 holds that the Long Barrow people were ‘quite similar to’ those whose remains have been found in caves, if ‘somewhat less extreme in physical type’; and Huxley1661 thought that all the dolichocephalic and mesaticephalic British skulls of the Neolithic Age belonged to the same race. Similarly Dr. Garson1662 identifies the river-bed type, represented in Britain by the Muskham skull, with that of the long barrows; while, according to Professor Boyd Dawkins, the skulls from the Welsh caves and from Tyddyn Bleiddyn ‘agree in shape... with some of those given in Tables i. and ii. of the “Crania Britannica” as “ancient British”’,1663 and ‘belong to that type which Professor Huxley terms the river-bed skull’,1664 and which, according to him, was identical ‘in general characters’ with the Long Barrow type.1665 Dr. Beddoe,1666 on the contrary, says that both they and the Caithness skulls ‘depart considerably from the typical long-barrow cranium’, and is inclined to regard them as belonging to a distinct mesaticephalic race.1667 The cephalic indices of the Welsh skulls, which range from 74·3 to 80,1668 are considerably higher than those of the Long Barrow skulls in general; and (though this may be unimportant) the average height of the men to whom they belonged was ‘little more than 5 feet’,1669 or considerably below the average height of the Long Barrow people. In my opinion neither they nor the Land’s End skull, which resembles them,1670 are pure specimens of the Long Barrow type;1671 and the same may be said of the East Ham and Muskham skulls. The one from Towyn-y-Capel, on the other hand, might be supposed to have come from a long barrow. The cephalic indices of the Caithness skulls range from 73 to 78. Four of them1672 might, I think, pass muster as Long Barrow skulls; but the remaining two1673 appear to me different. Of the Ledbury skull, the cephalic index of which is 77, Huxley himself says that ‘a little flattening and elongation, with a rather greater development of the supraciliary ridges would convert this into the nearest likeness to the Neanderthal skull which has yet been discovered’.1674 It may be that there was some infusion of the blood of the Long Barrow race in all the people to whom these skulls belonged; but I have little doubt that if, with the few exceptions which I have noted, they were placed on a table among those of the long barrows, a skilled craniologist could pick out every one of them. The difference is easily accounted for when it is remembered that the long barrows were almost certainly erected late in the Neolithic Age,1675 and that there were neolithic men in Scotland when the estuary of the Forth extended 8 or 10 miles west of Stirling, and when the sea relatively to the west coast was 25 feet higher than it is now.1676

A female skull, belonging apparently to the Neolithic Age, was discovered about the year 1891 ‘on the Batten promontory, near Plymouth Sound’.1677 According to the report of the discovery, it ‘approaches dolichocephaly’. A photograph of this skull1678 reminded me of some of the illustrations of round skulls in Crania Britannica. To quote from the report,1679 ‘the most striking features of the face are the great size of the orbits, the strongly marked superciliary ridge, the lowness of the retreating forehead’; and all these features are characteristic of some of the most typical Bronze Age skulls.

A few years ago Professor Macalister said that he had not recognized any skulls of the Long Barrow type in Ireland,1680 where no such barrows exist; but several specimens have since been found.1681

There is, as we have seen, reason to believe that the neolithic population of Britain were not homogeneous; but, with the qualifications that have been already noted, it may be truly said that the people of the long barrows present a uniform type. Whence did they come, and what were their affinities? The view which may be said to hold the field, although it is not universally accepted,1682 is that they belonged to the so-called ‘Iberian’ race. Before we discuss this theory, it may be well to warn the reader that among those who hold it are writers who have absolutely no knowledge of ‘the Iberian question’ except on the side of physical anthropology. The word ‘Iberian’, as used by ethnologists, is not always confined to the Iberians of history, that is, the inhabitants of the Spanish peninsula and of Southern Gaul between the Pyrenees and the Rhône:1683 it is often loosely applied to a people, possessing certain common physical features, who inhabited various parts of the Mediterranean basin, and, according to some writers, notably Sergi,1684 penetrated in late quaternary and neolithic times into almost every country of Europe. And when it is applied by ethnologists to the Iberians of history, it is not applied to all of them, for the Iberians of history were of course a mixed people: the ethnologists are thinking only of those Iberians who belonged to the dolichocephalic Mediterranean stock.

The arguments which have been brought forward in favour of the theory that the Long Barrow race belonged to the Iberian branch of the Mediterranean stock may be summarized as follows:— First, according to Tacitus,1685 the Silures, a British tribe which in his time inhabited what is now Monmouthshire, Glamorganshire, and Herefordshire, were dark and had curly hair, from which fact, as well as from their geographical position, he inferred that Iberians, that is inhabitants of the Spanish peninsula, had migrated into Britain.1686 But if the dolichocephalic Iberians were dark, so were the brachycephalic people who settled in Gaul in the Neolithic Age: Tacitus’s geographical argument was based upon the notion, prevalent among the ancient geographers,1687 that Spain was ‘opposite’ and near Britain; and it is of course incredible that people should have sailed in the Neolithic Age from Spain to our island.

Secondly, much stress has been laid upon the alleged resemblance of the Long Barrow skulls to those of the Basques, the assumption being that the latter were Iberians, properly so called. Dr. Garson affirms that there is ‘a strong similarity between Basque skulls and those of the Neolithic people of Britain’;1688 while Thurnam1689 points out that the skulls of the Basques are very ‘similar in many respects to the skulls from chambered long barrows of South-West Britain’, and that the Long Barrow skulls in general closely resemble ‘sixty Basque skulls lately added to the collection of the Anthropological Society of Paris’.1690 Moreover, Dr. Beddoe1691 says, ‘Many photographs of Basques... are recognized, both by myself and by an observant Welsh anthropologist to whom I have submitted them, as being in no respect different from some of the ordinary types of feature in South Wales.’

Now, as I have shown elsewhere,1692 the investigations which have been made regarding the cranial characters of the Basques have led to widely different results; and Dr. Garson does not say to what group of Basque skulls he refers. Both the Spanish and the French Basques, according to Dr. Collignon,1693 differ in certain respects from all other European peoples; but they also differ from each other, the former being generally dolichocephalic, while the latter are (according to Broca’s notation)1694 sub-brachycephalic, and their cranial capacity is considerably less than that of their Spanish brethren. Dr. Collignon is inclined to assimilate the Basques generally to the Kabyle type.1695 Assuming that the Long Barrow race resembled the Spanish Basques in certain respects, the resemblance only tends to show that the ancestors of the Long Barrow race came from the south. The ancestors, or rather some of the ancestors of the Basques were undoubtedly Iberians,—in one sense of the word: but the French Basque type which Dr. Collignon has described, and which he regards as original,1696 is in many respects different from that of the long barrows, which ethnologists call Iberian; and, as I have shown elsewhere,1697 the purest French Basques are generally fair, the Spanish Basques are less dark than other Spaniards, and the Long Barrow race were undoubtedly dark. Moreover, many ethnologists overlook the fact that the language of the so-called Iberian inscriptions, which have been found scattered over the territory that belonged to the Iberians, cannot be interpreted by the aid of Basque,1698 and shows no trace of kinship with Basque.

Thirdly, Sergi, affirming that the Long Barrow people belonged to the Iberian branch of the stock which he has taught ethnologists to call Mediterranean, says,1699 ‘I have compared the forms of the skulls from British graves with ancient.... Mediterranean skulls, and have found those characteristic of Spain, of Portugal... of Greece, of Hissarlik, and of East Africa.’ The fact is undeniable; but obviously it does not tend to prove that the Long Barrow race belonged to the Iberian rather than to the Ligurian branch, which, according to Sergi,1700 ‘extends from the Iberian peninsula as far as Italy,’ or to any other branch of the Mediterranean stock. Moreover, when Sergi affirms1701 that ‘wherever the Mediterranean stock established itself, it preserved its primitive burial custom of inhumation’, and that ‘incineration was of absolutely Aryan [that is to say, on his theory, Asiatic] origin’,1702 he weakens his argument, for it is certain that incineration was practised by many of the Long Barrow people.1703 Furthermore, Sergi tells us that skeletons of ‘the Mediterranean type’ are characterized by ‘slender and delicate forms’,1704 and doubtless most of the skeletons which have been found in long barrows answer to this description; but thirteen skeletons found in a chambered long barrow at Rodmarton, Gloucestershire, were distinguished by ‘powerful and vigorous frames’.1705

I conclude that there is not sufficient evidence for referring the Long Barrow people to the Iberian rather than to some other branch of the Mediterranean stock.

It is generally admitted that the Long Barrow race closely resembled in cranial characteristics, and to a lesser degree in stature, the dolichocephalic neolithic population of Gaul, of whom the people whose remains have been discovered in the caverns of l’Homme Mort1706 and Baumes-Chaudes1707 were perhaps the most typical representatives; and this resemblance confirms the truth of the theory that the Long Barrow people were a branch of the ‘Mediterranean’ stock. But one argument, upon which Thurnam1708 laid great stress, should warn us to be cautious in drawing conclusions from the skeletal characters of prehistoric peoples of whose other characters we are necessarily ignorant. About the middle of the nineteenth century several skeletons were discovered in a neolithic barrow at Fontenay, near Caen. Their skulls resembled those of the long barrows; and the height of the tallest, according to Thurnam’s system of measurement, would not have exceeded 5 feet 1 inch, or 1 metre 550. This, he triumphantly remarks, confirms the opinion that the peoples who erected the sepulchral chambers at Fontenay and in the south-west of England belonged to the same race. But the average height of the Long Barrow people, according to Thurnam, was 5 feet 5·4 inches,1709 and the average height of the brachycephalic Round Barrow people 5 feet 8·4 inches.1710 This difference of 3 inches is one of the facts upon which he relies to prove the distinction—a distinction which is of course as certain as it is universally admitted—between the Long Barrow people and the brachycephalic Round Barrow people. Yet he regards the difference of 4.4 inches between the average height of the Long Barrow people and the tallest of the men who were buried at Fontenay as sufficient to prove the racial identity of the latter with the former!

Dr. Keane1711 maintains that the route followed by the people who introduced the neolithic culture into the British Isles is indicated by the dolmens which abound in many parts of Northern Africa, and are scattered along the western side of the Spanish peninsula and over nearly the whole area of France. This is also the opinion of Professor Flinders Petrie, who affirms that ‘the dolmens belong to one continuous series, passing from Syria, along North Africa, and up Spain to Western Europe’,1712 of Montelius,1713 Sophus Müller,1714 and Sergi.1715 Penka, on the other hand (I quote from Mr. J. L. Myres’s exposition of his views), ‘reads the series the other way,’ because ‘while on the north these monuments go back into the Stone Age, in France and the south they belong to the Bronze Age’. He observes that ‘the discovery of dolmens in North Africa and Syria... has proceeded pari passu with the discovery both of actual survival of a tall blond dolichocephalic race in the same areas, and of evidence in Egyptian portraiture of its wider extension in the second millennium B.C.’ He maintains therefore that the earliest dolmen-builders were dolichocephalic blonds, speaking an Aryan language, in Southern Scandinavia and Denmark.1716

Now the ethnological problem presented by the distribution of the dolmens is exceedingly difficult; and it is not certain that either of the above-mentioned views is right. Dolmens are found not only in the countries which have been already mentioned, but also in Japan, India, Persia, Arabia, Syria, Palestine, Moab, Asia Minor, the Crimea, the Netherlands, Northern Germany, and the Balearic Islands;1717 and it is possible that in certain other countries their non-existence may be due simply to lack of the necessary stones.1718 In the territory which corresponds with ancient Gaul there are no dolmens east of the line formed by the Jura and the Vosges;1719 while the departments in which they are most numerous form a band extending obliquely from Finistère to Gard, that is, from the Channel to the Mediterranean.1720 The single department of the Morbihan contains more megalithic monuments, including menhirs, or single standing stones, than all the other departments put together; but in the list of dolmens it ranks below Aveyron and Ardèche.1721 In the Spanish peninsula almost all the dolmens are concentrated in Portugal, the north-eastern corner of Spain, and the southern and eastern seaboard: in Southern Britain they are found in Cornwall, Devonshire, Dorsetshire, Somersetshire, Wiltshire, Oxfordshire, Berkshire, Kent, Derbyshire, Staffordshire, and Northumberland, in Monmouthshire,1722 Herefordshire, and Wales;1723 while in Scotland they are represented by the horned cairns of Caithness and the chambered cairns of Orkney, Inverness, Argyllshire, Arran, and other islands.1724 In Ireland they are everywhere, but most numerous in the west.1725

There is a striking resemblance, which, in certain cases, amounts to almost complete identity of form, between many of the dolmens of Western Europe and some even of the Caucasus and India; although, as might have been expected, local peculiarities exist everywhere.1726 Thus the chambered long barrow of West Kennet in Wiltshire is identical in construction with the Hünebedden, or ‘Giants’ Graves’, of Brandenburg, Mecklenburg, and Hanover;1727 and close resemblances have been noted between certain dolmens in Wales and others in Brittany and Portugal,1728 between some in Antrim and others in Denmark,1729 and between certain Irish dolmens and the peculiar ship-shaped monuments of the Balearic Isles.1730 It is of course true that in sepulchres of such rude and simple construction general resemblance is inevitable, and does not necessarily imply community of origin: but when we find that in the Caucasus, in Syria and India, and in every European country in which dolmens exist some few have one of their stones pierced with a hole;1731 that the covering-stones of certain dolmens in Portugal, Ireland, Cornwall, Sweden, and elsewhere are indented with small circular depressions,1732 and that the sepulchral customs discernible in the dolmens of widely separated countries are virtually identical,1733 it must be admitted that there is ground for the opinion that the custom of dolmen-building originated with some one people.1734 On the other hand, it is easily conceivable that these coincidences originated in customs and beliefs which may have been common property before the first dolmen was set up, or which may have been handed on at a later time from tribe to tribe. De Mortillet argued that dolmens were not the exclusive creation of any one race because in France skeletons of widely different races have been found within them.1735 But this fact only proves that an intruding race buried their dead in dolmens built by others, or else adopted the custom of dolmen-building from their predecessors. It has also been argued that the differences in detail which are noticeable in the dolmens of the various countries of Western Europe prove that they were not the work of one migratory people but of various settled tribes; and that this conclusion is borne out by the similarity between the culture of the dolmen-builders of widely separated countries such as France and Denmark.1736 What is certain is that if the dolmens had been erected successively by peoples who migrated westward from Syria or even North Africa, and whose descendants moved on northward to the British Isles, we should expect to find that the British dolmens belonged to a period very much later than those of the Mediterranean. But the oldest dolmens of North Africa are assigned by General Faidherbe to the very end of the Neolithic and the commencement of the Bronze Age.1737 The arguments of Penka, whatever value they may have in regard to the origin of dolmen-building, certainly do not prove that the Long Barrow race were descended from Scandinavian ancestors: for their skulls are easily distinguishable from those of Scandinavia;1738 the neolithic pottery of Britain is utterly different from that of the north;1739 and the distribution of the dolmens in the British Isles, where they are most numerous in Western Britain and in Ireland, is hardly consistent with the theory that the people who erected them came from the north-east. Moreover, the remains which have been found in the oldest Scandinavian dolmens indicate that the culture which they represent was more advanced than that which is manifested in similar tombs in Gaul or the British Isles.1740

On the question of the origin of dolmens I offer no opinion. But in regard to those of Western Europe the least improbable theory appears to be that which was first tentatively propounded by M. Cazalis de Fondonce,1741 and developed by Mr. Borlase,1742 namely, that a dolichocephalic people who were erecting dolmens in France and the Spanish peninsula, where these monuments may have been evolved from sepulchral caves,1743 were forced westward by the brachycephalic ‘Grenelle’ race who invaded those countries in the Neolithic Age;1744 that some of them migrated into the British Isles, and others into Holland and Northern Germany,1745 whence the custom of dolmen-building would have spread to Denmark and Scandinavia; and that others [perhaps] moved southward into Africa. The earlier neolithic dolmen-builders of Gaul, like the Long Barrow people of Britain, belonged to the ‘Mediterranean’ type; and on the theory which I have stated their ancestors might have migrated into Spain and Gaul from Africa long before the first African dolmen was erected.

Lastly, linguistic arguments have been adduced to prove the African origin of the Long Barrow race.1746 Professor Morris Jones1747 endeavours to show that the Celtic language was modified, after it had been introduced into Britain, by the language or languages which it encountered;1748 and he claims to have established the syntactical similarity of the modern Celtic dialects to Egyptian and to the Hamitic dialects generally, and to have demonstrated that ‘neo-Celtic syntax agrees with Hamitic in almost every point where it differs from Aryan’.1749 This, he concludes, is ‘the linguistic complement of the anthropological evidence, and the strongest corroboration of the theory of the kinship of the early inhabitants of Britain to the North African white race’.

I would not, however, venture to commit myself to the theory of Sergi, that the cradle of the ‘Iberian’ race, or of the ‘Mediterranean’ race of which it was an offshoot, was in Northern Africa or Somaliland.1750 Professor Boyd Dawkins infers ‘from their range as far north as Scotland, and at least as far to the east as Belgium, that they travelled by the same paths that the Celtic, Belgic, and Germanic tribes travelled... coming from the East, and pushing their way to the West; and that another [group] mastered Northern Africa’; and he argues that this view ’is confirmed by the examination of the domestic animals which they possessed. The short-horned ox, the sheep, and the goat, are derived from wild stocks that are now to be found only in Central Asia.... None of these animals were known in Europe before the Neolithic Age.’1751 But any one who has read so far will have seen that the range of the ‘Iberian’ race ’as far north as Scotland’ lends no support to the theory that it originated in Asia. In regard to the argument which the professor derives from the examination of the domestic animals, Rolleston1752 inclined to the view that ‘though coming in the ultimate resort from the east, [they]... did not reach the north of the Alps directly from the East, but only... from the Greek and Italian peninsulas’. But the truth is that we do not know whether the earliest neolithic invaders of the British Isles or of Western Europe possessed short-horned oxen, sheep, or goats.1753 Supposing that these animals came from the East, is it not possible that they were introduced into Europe not by the ‘Mediterranean’ race but by brachycephalic neolithic immigrants? Moreover, Professor Boyd Dawkins has himself admitted that ‘the common domestic hog, descended from the wild boar, may have been originally tamed in Europe’,1754 and that the vegetables possessed by the Swiss lake-dwellers may have been ‘derived from Southern Europe’;1755 and it is now generally held that the domestic animals of the neolithic inhabitants of Europe were of European origin, and that there is no evidence that their plants and cereals were derived from Asia.1756

On the whole the evidence shows that the neolithic inhabitants of Britain, or at all events a large proportion of them, were descended from ancestors who lived in the Mediterranean basin. But it does not follow that they were more intimately related to the people whom the ancient writers called Iberians than to some other branch of the Mediterranean stock. It is certain that before the Romans entered the Spanish peninsula two languages at least besides Celtic were spoken there,—Basque and the language of the so-called Iberian inscriptions.1757 The latter has not yet been deciphered: but, as we have seen,1758 all attempts to explain it by means of Basque have failed; and, as Professor Morris Jones admits, all attempts to discover traces of Basque influence in the Celtic dialects have been equally unsuccessful.1759

Therefore it should be distinctly understood that if the term ‘Iberian’ is to be applied to the neolithic inhabitants of Britain, it must be taken in a purely conventional sense.1760

M. d’Arbois de Jubainville1761 adduces various British place-names, for example, Sabrina (the Severn), Isca (the Exe), Albion, and Cantium (Kent), which he chooses to call Ligurian; but I am not aware that he has made any converts. Little or nothing is known about the Ligurian tongue;1762 and even if M. d’Arbois’s conjectures could be verified their ethnological value would be comparatively slight; for, as I have shown elsewhere,1763 there is some reason to believe that the Ligurians, like the Iberians, belonged to the ‘Mediterranean’ stock.

It is perhaps hardly necessary now to insist upon the fact that the Long Barrow race is not extinct. Not only have their remains been found, as we shall presently see, in graves of the Bronze Age and the Late Celtic period,1764 but men of the same type, but little modified, are still numerous.1765

It is often taken for granted that no round barrows were erected in Britain before the close of the Neolithic Age, and that the earliest of the brachycephalic invaders whose remains have been found in them landed with bronze weapons in their hands.1766 But these assumptions are made in spite of conclusive evidence. There is not the slightest doubt that most if not all of the circular chambered cairns of Argyllshire, Caithness, Orkney, and Derbyshire were erected before the Bronze Age in those parts began.1767 Dr. Garson, speaking of brachycephalic skulls which have been found in round barrows in Orkney, says that ‘the fact that no metals of any kind were found, and that all the implements were of the most primitive manufacture, points to the people belonging to the unpolished stone period’, and concludes that ‘we probably post-date the existence of the people who buried in the round barrows of Orkney if we attribute them with (sic) the same antiquity as those of the round barrows of England’.1768 Dr. Garson has also shown that the round barrow of Howe Hill in Yorkshire was erected in the Neolithic Age, and that the skeletons found in it belong to the Long Barrow type.1769 The round-headed people who introduced drinking-cups into our island brought no bronze with them. According to Barnard Davis, a skull from a chambered round barrow at Parsley Hay Low in Derbyshire, which had a cephalic index of 81, ‘without doubt belongs to the early “stone-period”’;1770 and he assigns to the same epoch another skull, the cephalic index of which was the same, from Green Gate Hill barrow, Pickering, Yorkshire.1771 Canon Greenwell suggests that some of the round barrows ‘belong to an age before bronze was discovered’; and it is certain that the round barrows of this country were connected by evolution with the earlier long barrows.1772 Finally, if Sergi1773 is right in maintaining that ‘the new burial custom of cremation’ was introduced into Europe by brachycephalic immigrants, it follows that they invaded Britain in the Neolithic Age; for in this country, as in Gaul, cremation was then practised.1774

VII. The ‘Pictish Question’

A view which has become fashionable of late years, owing to the influence of Professor Rhys and Professor Zimmer, is that the [dolichocephalic] neolithic people of this country were identical with the Picts,1775 whose name first occurs in the panegyric addressed about A.D. 296 to Constantius Caesar.1776 To clear the ground, I should say, first, that it is universally admitted that descendants of the neolithic race survived not only in the part of Scotland which was inhabited by the Picts but in most parts of Britain. The question is whether the Picts represented that race in a special sense, and still spoke the neolithic non-Aryan language. As we shall see, Professor Rhys himself, who maintains that they did, emphatically affirms that among the medley of tribes who were known as Picts some were Celtic and spoke a Celtic tongue. Secondly, it may be well to state certain elementary facts of Celtic phonology (although I dare say that to most of those who may read these pages they are already familiar), without a knowledge of which parts of the following discussion and of the later section on the Celts would be unintelligible. The ancient Gauls, for the most part,1777 and the Brythons, from whose dialect modern Welsh is descended, are commonly called the P Celts; while the Goidels, whose dialect was the ancestor of Gaelic, Irish, and Manx, are known as the Q Celts. The reason of this distinction is that the Gauls and Brythons changed the original sound qu into p, while the Goidels retained it, and in the sixth century of our era modified it into c.1778 It has been affirmed, however, on the evidence of the formularies of Marcellus of Bordeaux, that some of the Western Gauls in the fourth century spoke a dialect which was akin to Goidelic;1779 and Professor Rhys and Mr. Nicholson1780 regard the words Sequani and Sequana (the Gallic name of the Seine) as proving that this dialect was not confined to the west: but M. d’Arbois de Jubainville refuses to admit that these names are Celtic,1781 and contemptuously denies that the formularies are to be taken seriously.1782 Professor Rhys1783 and Mr. Nicholson1784 also infer from certain inscriptions found in the departments of the Ain and Deux-Sèvres, which probably belong respectively to the first and the fourth century of our era, that a dialect akin to Goidelic was spoken in those localities: but here again M. d’Arbois dissents;1785 and he remarks that an inscription found at Géligneux in the department of the Ain contains a word, petru-decametos,1786 which belongs to the language of the P Celts. Professor Rhys urges that ‘the presence of monuments in the language occupying the subordinate position may be taken as evidence presumptive of its being the vernacular in the immediate neighbourhood’:1787 but, as we shall see hereafter,1788 a pillar, bearing a Goidelic inscription, has been found at Silchester, where the vernacular was undoubtedly Brythonic; and the obvious explanation is that the inscription was the work of a stranger. M. d’Arbois,1789 moreover, unlike Professor Rhys, maintains that when the Celts first invaded Britain, the Celtic language everywhere was one and the same: according to him, none of the Celts had then changed q into p, but that change was made at a later date by the Celts who conquered Gaul, and some of whose descendants afterwards conquered Britain. Until near the end of the nineteenth century Celtic scholars unanimously believed that all the Celtic dialects had rejected ‘Indo-European p’, except, as Mr. Nicholson says,1790 ‘in borrowed words or in certain combinations of consonants’; in other words, that wherever the Indo-European or Aryan tongue from which Celtic was descended had the sound of p the Celtic dialects had all lost it: but Professor Rhys holds that Mr. Nicholson has proved from the above-mentioned inscriptions, found in the departments of the Ain and Deux Sèvres, that it was retained by the Sequani and the Pictones.1791 M. d’Arbois de Jubainville of course rejects this conclusion; and he reminds his opponents that p is absent from all Ogam inscriptions.1792

1. In 296, when the panegyric addressed to Constantius was written, the Picts to whom the writer referred were confined to the part of Scotland which extends northward from the firths of Forth and Clyde; but Professor Rhys and Professor Zimmer maintain that the habitat of the Pictish people was once much more extensive. ‘Irish literature,’ says Professor Rhys,1793 ‘alludes to Picts here and there in Ireland... in such a way as to favour the belief that they were survivals of a race holding possession at one time of the whole country.’ That the Picts once inhabited the whole of Britain is proved, in the opinion not only of the two professors but also of M. d’Arbois de Jubainville, who differs from them on the question of Pictish ethnology, by the following linguistic facts.1794 The Irish name of the Picts was Cruthni.1795 Britain has, since the Middle Ages, been called in Welsh ynys Prydein: Prydein is the Welsh equivalent of Cruthni; and ynys Prydein means ‘the island of the Picts’. Now, as Professor Rhys remarks,1796 Prydein, with its cognate forms, Prydain, Prydyn, and Pryden, represents an old Welsh word Priten; and accordingly, the Brythonic or the Gaulish name of the Picts, when it reached the ears of the Greeks, would have been written by them Πρετανοί. It must of course be borne in mind that Cruthni, Prydain, and Priten did not appear in literature until long after Caesar’s time; but the etymology which connects Πρετανοί and Πρεταν(ν)ικαὶ (νῆσοι)—the name by which Ptolemy and other Greek writers call the British Isles1797—with Priten is accepted by Celtic scholars who, on the question of the ethnology of the Picts, differ widely among themselves. M. d’Arbois de Jubainville1798 concludes that in the time of Pytheas the masters of Britain were the Picts; while Professor Rhys holds that when, shortly before that epoch, the Brythons first landed in Britain,1799 not the Picts but the Goidelic Celts were the dominant race. In other words, he believes that the Goidelic Celts called the island which they conquered by ‘some such a Goidelic name as Inis Chruithni, “Island of the Picts”’.1800 M. d’Arbois identifies the Picts of the time of Pytheas with the ancestors of the Goidelic Celts: like Professor Rhys he regards the word Pretani as simply the Brythonic, or Gaulish form of a Goidelic word Qrtanoi, of which Cruthni was the later Irish equivalent;1801 but he holds that no Brythons had set foot in Britain until after the time of Pytheas, and that the word Pretani was learned by Pytheas not in Britain but in Gaul.

Both the views that have just been stated seem to involve difficulties. If Professor Rhys is right in believing that the pre-Roman Goidelic invaders of Britain (whose very existence, as we shall afterwards see, is not universally admitted) called the people whom they found in possession by some such name as Chruithni or Cruthni, the name which, transformed by Brythons into Pretanoi, was applied by Pytheas to the inhabitants of Britain generally, it would appear either that the Goidelic invaders had no name of their own or that it was suppressed.1802 Moreover, Professor Rhys does not explain how it happened that Pytheas never learned the name by which, as he tells us, the Brythons called themselves, namely, Brittones. On the other hand, M. d’Arbois’s view would compel us either to assign the first Brythonic invasion to a date a century later than that which is now generally accepted,1803 or to assume that Pytheas, although he visited Britain, learned nothing there of the name of its inhabitants. I confess that I cannot suggest any satisfactory solution.

It remains to be inquired whether the Picts of history did really, in a special sense, represent the neolithic population, and whether they spoke a non-Aryan language.

2. Was the word Pict, in its original form, pre-Aryan or Celtic? The answers that have been given to this question only serve to amuse the ignorant scoffer, and to illustrate the truth that even if the labours of Zeuss placed the study of the ancient Celtic languages upon a scientific basis, Celtic scholars still know very little about them. When we inquire of Professor Rhys, we are perplexed by the quick changes of front to which his most devoted disciples have by this time become accustomed. In the second edition of his Celtic Britain1804 he said that ‘neither the Picts nor the Scotti probably owned these names, the former of which is to be traced to Roman authors’; and he described the theory which ‘connected the Pict with the Gaulish Pictones’ as a ‘clumsy invention’.1805 In his Rhind Lectures he assured us that ‘the principal non-Aryan name of the inhabitants of both islands [Great Britain and Ireland] was some prototype of the word Pict’,1806 and gave reasons, which are now generally accepted, for believing that that name was not connected with the Latin pictus.1807 At the same time he definitely committed himself to the view which he had previously derided as a ‘clumsy invention’, and affirmed that ‘the word Pict... is hardly to be severed from the Pictones of ancient Gaul’. In The Welsh People, which first appeared in 1900, and in a later edition of the same work, dated 1902,1808 he argued that ‘Ictis [the name of an island mentioned by Diodorus Siculus1809] and Icht [the old Irish name of the English Channel] represent possibly a Celtic pronunciation of the same Aboriginal word which the Romans made into Pictus... we must’, he added, ‘suppose it an early name which the Aborigines adopted, while the Celts... applied another name Qṷrtani, Pretani, Cruithni,’ &c. But in the same year in which the first edition of The Welsh People appeared he told the members of the British Association that ‘pictos was a Celtican word of the same etymology, and approximately, doubtless, of the same meaning as the Latin pictus; that the Celticans had applied it at an early date to the Picts on account of their... tattooing themselves; and that the Picts had accepted it’.1810 It is not absolutely clear whether by ‘the Celticans’ he means only those people of Gaul who spoke a language akin to Goidelic or the first Celtic invaders of Britain. As, however, we are told that the Picts accepted their name from ‘the Celticans’, it would seem that those ‘Celticans’ were, or at all events included, the British Goidels; and we ask ourselves in bewilderment why, if the ‘Celticans’ applied the name pictos to the Picts, they also applied the name Qṷrtani.1811 But when we open the latest edition of Celtic Britain,1812 we find that the professor’s views are still in process of development, or of flux. He now reverts to the theory that ‘the native name which suggested the Latin [Pictus] was not of Celtic origin either, though only found treated as Celtic’. He adds that ‘the term Pictones, as occurring in Gaul in Caesar’s time, makes it probable that it was also a name of long standing in Britain’; and finally he avows with characteristic candour that ‘we know not from what language it comes’. Turning to our other authorities, we learn from Zimmer that Picti is obviously a Latin translation of the name [the ancestor of Prydain] which the Romans learned from the Britons.1813 In other words, the German savant holds that the word Pictos [if it ever existed except as a Latin accusative plural] was neither aboriginal in Britain, nor Celtican. It has been suggested1814 that Picti is connected with the old Irish word cicht,1815 a carver or engraver, and is the Cymric form of a Goidelic word Qicti;1816 while Mr. Nicholson, who insists that Picti is not Cymric but Goidelic, claims to have ‘fully shown that this name is... from the root peik- “tattoo”, with Ind.-Eur. p preserved’.1817

The one absolutely certain conclusion to which the student of ethnology can come is that the name of the Picts has not been proved to be of pre-Aryan origin.

3. Still, Professors Rhys and Zimmer will have it that the Picts must have been a non-Aryan people. Caesar,1818 in a well-known passage, states that among the Britons groups of ten or twelve men had wives in common; in other words, that one of the British customs was polyandry. It has generally been assumed that he meant to say that the custom was prevalent among the Britons generally; but Zimmer, after reviewing the whole chapter in which the passage occurs, concludes that it refers only to interiores—the Britons of the interior1819—whom Caesar contrasts with maritimi,—the descendants of the Belgic invaders. The latter, he argues, according to Caesar’s express statement, differed but slightly in their customs from the Gauls:1820 therefore the words in which Caesar describes the British custom of polyandry cannot refer to them, but must refer to interiores.1821 The two professors agree in thinking that Caesar, owing to his ‘inability to realize a state of society exclusively based on birth’,1822 misunderstood the institution which he tried to describe; in other words, that that institution was not polyandry but matriarchy,—the rule of succession by which rank and property are transmitted in the female line; a king, for example, being succeeded not by his own son but by the son of one of his sisters.1823 Zimmer, referring to Schrader’s Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples,1824 remarks that among all Aryan-speaking peoples and among the primitive Aryans the custom by which a father is succeeded by his own son (das Vaterrecht) was the foundation of social ordinance.1825 Professor Rhys,1826 indeed, thinks that this generalization cannot be proved, and refers to a well-known passage in the 20th chapter of the Germania of Tacitus,—‘Sisters’ sons are held in as much esteem by their uncles as by their fathers: indeed, some regard the relation as even more sacred and binding’,1827 &c. (Sororum filiis idem apud avunculum qui apud patrem honor: quidam sanctiorem artioremque hunc nexum sanguinis arbitrantur); but he suggests that the tribe of which Tacitus speaks may have been mixed with some ‘aboriginal race practising the same institution as the aborigines of the British Isles’. And I suggest that the Picts were Celts mixed with aborigines who practised this same institution, and consequently that if it prevailed among the Picts, its prevalence does not prove that they were in any special sense representatives of the aborigines, or that they spoke a non-Aryan language.1828

Having corrected Caesar’s narrative to his own satisfaction, Professor Rhys sets himself to prove that matriarchy was a Pictish institution. He observes1829 that ‘a Pictish king [during the later period of the Roman occupation and afterwards] could not be succeeded by a son of his own, but usually by a sister’s son. The succession,’ he continues, ‘was through the mother, and it points back to a state of society which, previous to the conversion of the Picts to Christianity, was probably based on matriarchy as distinguished from marriage and marital custom.’ To show that matriarchy had formerly prevailed in Britain outside the territory within which the Picts of history were confined, he adds1830 that ‘the ancient literature of Ireland abounds in allusions to heroes who are usually described with the aid of the mother’s name’, and that ‘this kind of nomenclature implies the Pictish succession as its origin’. Again, he quotes an inscription found at Colchester, which ends with the words

DONVM. LOSSIO. VEDA. DE SVO
POSVIT. NEPOS. VEPOGENI. CALEDO.

(‘This gift has been dedicated at his own expense by Lossio Veda, the son of the sister [?] of Vepogen, a Caledonian’), and remarks that when Lossio calls himself a Caledonian, that ‘is for our purpose much the same as if he had called himself a Pict’, and that, moreover, both Veda and Vepogeni ‘may be said to occur in the list of Pictish kings’, where the latter is ‘written Vipoig’. Vepogeni, indeed, is a Celtic word, borrowed, the professor assures us, in accordance with Pictish custom; but ‘the reduction of Vepogen to Vepog, which is what underlies Vipoig, is impossible on Celtic ground... while Pictish offers a simple and natural explanation’.1831

Professor Morris Jones remarks, in support of Professor Rhys’s argument, that ‘the Pictish succession’ has ‘come down to our own times among the Berbers’1832 (or rather Kabyles), who, he says, have been shown, on craniological grounds, to be akin to our neolithic race.

Apparently Professor Rhys does not regard the custom of reckoning descent ‘by birth alone’ as confined in these islands to the Picts, or to the pre-Aryan aborigines: if, as he is inclined, like Professor Zimmer, to believe, it was non-Aryan, ‘it must,’ he says, ‘have been accepted by the Goidelic Celts from the aborigines.’1833

Now, in regard to this last observation, the comment suggests itself that what Professor Rhys has not yet proved is that those aborigines were Picts. The Picts, as we shall presently see, were, according to some Celtic scholars, themselves Goidelic Celts (mixed of course with aborigines whom they had subdued and Celticized); according to others, their speech was akin to Brythonic.1834 And if, as Professor Rhys insists, matriarchy may have been accepted by the Celts from the aborigines, it is perhaps not incredible that, as Mr. Sidney Hartland suggests, the Celts themselves, in prehistoric times, may have passed through the matriarchal stage,1835 and that the survival of matriarchy among the Picts is not necessarily attributable to pre-Aryan ancestry.1836 But, be that as it may, the survival of matriarchy among the Picts proves nothing more than that among the Picts, as among every other British people, the substratum of the population was pre-Aryan: it does not prove that the dominant element among them was pre-Aryan, or that they spoke a non-Aryan language.

As for Professor Morris Jones’s argument, it may perhaps raise a probability that the ‘Pictish succession’ prevailed among the neolithic race, although, if the argument is worth anything, the professor ought to be able to show that the same institution belonged to the ‘Iberians’ of Spain, of Gaul, and of other countries who have also been shown ‘on craniological grounds’ to be akin to the Kabyles: but at all events it lends no support to the theory that the Picts were, in any special sense, descendants of the neolithic aborigines; for, assuming that they were Celts, they might have accepted the Pictish succession from them. There remains Professor Rhys’s statement that ‘the reduction of Vepogen to Vepog, which is what underlies Vipoig, is impossible on Celtic ground’. Is the professor quite sure? A few years ago he would certainly have said that the retention of ‘Indo-European p’ was ‘impossible on Celtic ground’; but in 1900 he announced that the ‘Celtican language’ which was spoken in the country of the Sequani ‘preserves intact the Aryan consonant p’.1837 He has himself assured us that both the Celtic dialects spoken in the British Isles were greatly modified by a pre-Aryan language.1838 Assuming, for the sake of argument, that the Pictish language was Celtic, is he prepared to deny that it could have been so far modified by a non-Aryan tongue that ‘the reduction of Vepogen to Vepog’ would still have been ‘impossible on Celtic ground’?1839 Finally, when he tells us that Lossio’s description of himself as a Caledonian ’is for our purpose much the same as if he had called himself a Pict’, we cannot help recalling his own statement1840 that ‘the Caledonians were, as we understand their history, Goidels’; though, to be sure, in the latest edition of Celtic Britain1841 he expunges this compromising sentence, and substitutes for it ‘the Caledonians were Picts’.

For my part I accept the professor’s emendation unreservedly. Picts the Caledonians certainly were; for does not the author of the panegyric addressed to Constantine speak of ‘the Caledonians and other Picts’?1842 But for me the Picts were a mixed people, comprising descendants of the neolithic aborigines, of the Round Barrow race, and of the Celtic invaders,—a mixed people who spoke a Celtic dialect. And what puzzles me is that the professor should not have been struck by the anthropological facts that are fatal to the theory that the Caledonians were Picts in the sense which he attaches to the word,—that is, pure survivors of the neolithic aborigines, who spoke a non-Aryan language. For the neolithic aborigines, as we have seen, were, speaking generally, small dark men of the ‘Iberian’ type: the Caledonians were big fair or red-haired men. Doubtless there were, as I have said, ‘Iberian’ survivors among them; but who will deny that the powerful race whom Tacitus describes were predominant, or that their Aryan tongue had prevailed?1843

4. It is usually inferred from statements in Claudian1844 and Herodian1845 that the Picts tattooed themselves; and their testimony is supposed to be strengthened by the etymology of the names by which the Picts were known to the Irish and Welsh respectively,—Cruthni and Prydain. The former is said to be derived from cruth,1846 the Gaelic word for ‘form’ or ‘shape’; and the latter from its Welsh equivalent, pryd.1847 Thus Cruthni and Prydain would mean ‘the people whose bodies were decorated with figures’; and, as we have seen, Zimmer has no doubt that the Roman name for the Picts—Picti, or ‘painted men’—was simply a translation of Prydain or its older equivalent. Professor Rhys, who, in one of his many and diverse utterances on the subject, affirmed that pictos was a Celtican word,1848 drew this conclusion from the fact, pointed out by Mr. Nicholson,1849 that a coin of the Gallic tribe of the Pictones1850 bears on the obverse a tattooed face; and he supposes that the reason why the Celticans applied this word to the Picts was that the latter tattooed themselves. ‘The Picts of Britain and Ireland,’ he remarks, ‘are found also called Pictones’; and ‘ancient Egyptian monuments represent the Libyans of North Africa with their bodies tattooed’.1851

Now what does this community of custom prove about the ethnology of the Picts? The inhabitants of the Tonga and Society Islands and of New Guinea tattoo themselves: so do the Burmese, the Shans, the Maoris, and the people of British East Africa;1852 so do very many Englishmen. All the available evidence tends to show that among the ancient inhabitants of the British Isles tattooing was not confined to the Picts. Herodian does not mention the Picts at all: he merely says that the Britons tattooed themselves. Professor Rhys admits, or rather strenuously maintains, that in the territory inhabited by the Picts in Scotland there were also numerous Celts;1853 and he would hardly deny that they were included among the people whom Herodian describes. He himself remarks that ‘the Scotti (that is to say the Goidels)’1854 practised tattooing.1855 Mr. Nicholson, to whom he appeals, argues from the evidence of coins that tattooing was customary not only among the Pictones, but also among several other tribes of Gaul,—the Ambiani, the Baiocasses, the Caletes, the Coriosopites, the Osismi, the Sequani, and the Unelli. All these peoples were undoubtedly Celtic; that is to say, they were Celtic-speaking tribes among whom the Celtic element, ethnologically speaking, was, I do not say numerically, but politically predominant. Professor Rhys would certainly not argue that they were Picts: yet if he admits, as he does, that they were Celtic, the argument which he bases on the practice of tattooing collapses.

5. Some years ago Professor Rhys attempted to prove that the Pictish language was related to Basque;1856 ‘but,’ he says, ‘whether it is related or not, my attempt to prove that it is has been pronounced, and doubtless justly pronounced, a failure.’1857 At the same time, however, pointing to a famous ogam inscription, he wrote, ‘my challenge still remains, that if Pictish resembled Gaelic or Welsh, or in fact any Aryan language, those who think so should make good their opinion by giving us a translation of such an inscription, for instance, as the following from Lunasting, in Shetland:—Xttocuhetts: ahehhttmnnn: hccvvevv: nehhtonn.’1858

The lay reader will perhaps mentally endorse the comment of another Celtic scholar, Dr. Alexander Macbain, who disposes of the cacophonous puzzle by observing that ‘it is neither Welsh nor any other language’.1859 For the present, at all events, it is safe to say that Dr. Macbain is as likely to be right as Mr. Nicholson, who, having boldly accepted Professor Rhys’s challenge, first judiciously reconstructed the text of the inscription, and then made an heroic attempt to translate his own version. It is Goidelic, so he assures us; and it means

‘Place of O’ Cuhetts
 his place within:
 CUAIBH of Nehton’.1860

On the other hand, the translation which Professor Rhys ‘provisionally’ offers of his text runs

‘“Kin—Ahehhtmnnn King Nechtan”.

That is to say, King Nechtan of the kin of Ahehhtmnnn’.1861

Perhaps it shows a slight lack of humour to attempt, even ‘provisionally’, to translate an inscription assumed to be written in a language the very existence of which is doubtful. Still it is conceivable that Professor Rhys’s text means what he says. But, supposing that it resembles neither Gaelic, nor Welsh, nor any Aryan language, what does it prove? Not that the Picts represented the neolithic aborigines, but simply that in the remotest of the British isles there still survived the non-Aryan language which, as every scholar admits, was once spoken in Britain.

But the truth is that the so-called Pictish inscriptions, even in the hands of the philologist, are so intractable that for ethnology they are practically useless. ‘I can hardly do more,’ says Professor Rhys,1862 ‘than pick from previous attempts by others and by myself what seems to me the most probable reading.’ This is only one of numerous instances in his well-known article on the inscriptions which show how impossible it is to construct the text with any approach towards certainty.

Professor Rhys remarks, further,1863 that ‘we have indications in Adamnan’s Life of Columba that [in the sixth century of our era] the language of the aborigines was still a living tongue’. The indications are that when Columba, who spoke Goidelic, visited the province of the Picts, he preached ‘to peasants or plebeians by interpreter’. To those who hold, with Dr. Whitley Stokes and Dr. Macbain, that the Pictish dialect was akin to Brythonic, the fact on which Professor Rhys lays stress presents of course no difficulty. M. d’Arbois de Jubainville, however, while he agrees with Dr. Macbain,1864 makes a reply to Professor Rhys which might be used by those who hold, with Mr. Nicholson, that Pictish was akin to Goidelic. He tells a story of a Breton priest of the diocese of Quimper who assured him that he himself could not understand the Breton dialect of a woman who belonged to the diocese of Vannes.1865

Mr. Nicholson1866 says that ‘we have abundant materials for deciding whether Pictish was or was not (1) Aryan, (2) Keltic, (3) Goidelic, in (a) the place-names recorded by ancient geographers and one or two mediaeval documents, (b) the person-names given by one or two ancient historians and in mediaeval chronicles, (c) the inscriptions’. From these materials Mr. Nicholson undertakes to demonstrate that Pictish was Goidelic, and that ‘it stands to Highland Gaelic in exactly the same relation in which Anglo-Saxon stands to modern English’;1867 while Dr. Whitley Stokes1868 and Dr. Macbain1869 undertake with equal confidence to demonstrate that it was related to Brythonic. According to Bede,1870 the place which marked the western termination of the wall of Severus was called in Pictish Peanfahel. Pean is commonly identified with the Welsh word penn, ‘a head’; and accordingly it has been inferred that Pictish was ‘a Kymric or semi-Kymric dialect’.1871 Mr. Nicholson, on the other hand, claims to have shown that Pean is ‘a Goidelic borrowing from the Latin penna or pinna’. Professor Rhys1872 formerly clung to the view that Peanfahel was a Brythonic name, but was not in the least disconcerted thereby; for, he explained, ‘the Picts must have learnt it... from the Verturian Brythons.’ On the question of etymology he has now become a convert to Mr. Nicholson’s view:1873 but on the question of ethnology he retains his own opinion; for, he explains, ‘The non-Celtic Picts, when we find them coming southwards, seem to have been fast adopting the idioms of their neighbours.’1874 Mr. Nicholson1875 analyses with laborious ingenuity a large number of names in Adamnan’s Life of Columba, of place-names in the Pictish Chronicle, of Pictish historical names, and of words which occur in the ‘Pictish inscriptions’, and insists that they are Goidelic: Dr. Whitley Stokes[1876] and Dr. Macbain[1877] produce words from the same sources, from Ptolemy’s Geography, and from Dion Cassius, and insist that they are Brythonic. Dr. Stokes’s authority is so great that his verdict is worth quoting:—‘The foregoing list of names and other words contains much that is still obscure; but on the whole it shows that Pictish, so far as regards its vocabulary, is an Indo-European and especially Celtic speech. Its phonetics, so far as we can ascertain them, resemble those of Welsh rather than of Irish.’1878

But the arguments for Brythonic, on the one hand, and for Goidelic, on the other, leave Professor Rhys unmoved. Prove as many Pictish words as you please to have been Goidelic, as many as you please to have been Brythonic: he will regard them with serene indifference.1879 For, he tells you,1880 ‘the Pictish language would seem to have been rapidly becoming overloaded with loan-words from Goidelic or Brythonic when we first hear anything about it. So, failing to recognize this borrowing of words by the Picts, some have been led to regard Pictish as a kind of Gaelic, and some as a dialect akin to Welsh. The point to have been decided, however, was not whether Gaelic or Welsh explains certain words said to have been in use among the Picts, but whether there does not remain a residue to which neither Gaelic nor Welsh, nor, indeed, any Aryan tongue whatever can supply any sort of key.’ The professor is still thinking of that outlandish inscription which, according to Mr. Nicholson, is Goidelic, and the professor’s reading of which, according to Dr. Macbain, is no language at all. But, admitting provisionally the existence of ‘a residue’ to which no Aryan language ‘can supply any sort of key’, we should, I must repeat, only have to conclude that in certain remote parts of the extensive territory occupied by the Picts a non-Aryan language survived into the Christian era, just as in a remote part of France a non-Aryan language survives at this day: we should not have to conclude that that language was spoken by the Picts in general. ‘La question,’ says M. d’Arbois de Jubainville, in a notice of Professor Rhys’s article on the Pictish inscriptions,1881 ‘la question est de savoir si cette population [the pre-Aryan population] est restée dominante. Les noms de peuples tels que Smertae... des noms d’hommes tels que celui du Calédonien Argentocoxos... me semblent décisifs.’ It is absolutely certain, and is insisted upon by Professor Rhys himself, that in Roman times many of the tribes which were included under the general designation of Picts bore Celtic names, and that many of the geographical names in the country which they inhabited were Celtic also. On the other hand, not a single Pictish name, tribal, or geographical, or personal, not a single Pictish word which has been preserved by Ptolemy or by our other authorities, has been proved to be non-Celtic; and if, as Professor Rhys maintains, Pictish was a non-Aryan language overlain by loan-words from the two Celtic dialects, it was so buried beneath them as to be no longer discernible. Argentocoxos,1882 as the professor says, was a Pict, and one of the many Picts whose names were Celtic: if the Picts had spoken a non-Celtic language, however much overloaded with Celtic loan-words, would not their own names have been non-Aryan? As their names were Celtic, it is reasonable to infer that their language was Celtic also. The professor, it is true, points out that ‘in Wales many a man has the English name John Jones, though he cannot speak English’.1883 Yes, but the Welsh are a conquered or, let us say, absorbed people, whereas the professor himself assures us1884 that before the time of Ptolemy ‘the Goidels and the Picto-Brythons [of the North] had come under the power of the more purely non-Celtic tribes beyond them’.1885 But this is of course a pure assertion. The professor fails to prove that any Celtic people in Britain came under the power of non-Celtic tribes. Many centuries before the time of Pytheas the neolithic population had for the most part been reduced to subjection; and, although remote clans may possibly have retained their individuality, in many parts of the island the descendants of the aborigines had become intermingled, first with the ‘Round Barrow’ invaders, the earlier of whom at all events, as I shall presently show,1886 were not Celts, and secondly with the Celts themselves. Professor Rhys1887 himself admits that the name of the Picts ‘was never, perhaps, distinctive of race, as Brythons and Goidels seem to have been sometimes included under it’; and, although he goes on to say that ‘the term probably applied most strictly at all times’ to ‘the non-Celtic natives’, it is not likely that the name of non-Celtic natives should have prevailed over that of the Celts.

For all these reasons it appears to me infinitely more probable that in Pictland as, according to Professor Rhys himself, in the rest of Britain,1888 the non-Aryan language should have been absorbed by Celtic than that Celtic should have been absorbed by the non-Aryan language.

There is probably this grain of truth in Professor Rhys’s theory, that the non-Celtic natives continued to exist in greater purity in the country which was occupied by a group of tribes who, during the latter part of the Roman occupation and afterwards, were called Picts, than in any other part of Britain. But I doubt whether this eminent scholar could have spent his time less profitably than in striving to demonstrate, first, that the language of the Picts was related to Basque, and, when he was forced to abandon this attempt, in clinging to the theory that it was a non-Aryan tongue.

VIII. The Round-Heads

There is, as we have already seen,1889 sufficient evidence that round-headed immigrants had begun to appear in Britain towards the end of the Neolithic Age; but the majority of the prehistoric skulls of this kind undoubtedly belong to the Age of Bronze. Men of the same type were living in England at the time of the Saxon invasion;[1890] and their descendants may be recognized here and there at the present day.1891 The prehistoric skeletons have been found not only in the round barrows of Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Staffordshire, Wiltshire, Dorsetshire, Denbighshire, Man, and Orkney, and in secondary interments in long barrows, but also in Welsh caverns and graves and in the short cists of Scotland.1892 The range of this people in Britain was, however, it need hardly be said, far wider than that which the discovery of a few skeletons has indicated.

The round-headed invaders are commonly described as physically finer men than the neolithic population whom in most parts of Britain they subdued;1893 but the truth is that, both in respect of stature and of cranial form, they belonged to two utterly different groups, though, as might be expected, some exhibit characteristics of both.1894 The average height of 17 brachycephalic men whose skeletons had been found in round barrows before 1865 would have been, according to Dr. Beddoe’s estimate, 5 feet 9 inches, or almost 1 metre 753; while the average height of 27 men of various cephalic indices, including the 17 just mentioned, whose skeletons (described in Crania Britannica) have been found in round barrows, would, according to the same authority, have reached 5 feet 9⅖ inches,1895 or approximately 1 metre 763. Measurements of skeletons which have been discovered since the publication of Crania Britannica have yielded results virtually the same.[1896] On the other hand two groups of skeletons have recently been described which belonged to a much shorter race. Four, taken from round barrows in Glamorganshire, showed, according to Dr. Beddoe’s method, an average height of about 5 feet 5¾ inches;1897 while 7 male skeletons, found in short cists in and near Aberdeenshire, ranged, according to Mr. Alexander Low, between 5 feet and 5 feet 7 inches, the average being only 5 feet 3 inches.1898 The skulls of these skeletons will be presently described.

The cephalic indices of 103 male skulls, found before the year 1894 in round barrows or in other interments of the Bronze Age,[1899] ranged from 70 to 88, 55 of them exceeding 80; while those of 19 skeletons from round barrows in which no bronze was found ranged from 68 to 88, six of them exceeding 80.1900 In both series a large proportion of the skulls whose indices fell short of 80 belonged, wholly or in part, to the Long Barrow race. Other skulls, however, which have since been described and of the characteristics of which Dr. Beddoe, the compiler of this list, may have been ignorant, yielded indices higher still.1901

But it is not enough to describe the invaders of the Bronze Age as brachycephalic: they shared that characteristic with peoples who were otherwise markedly different from them. Let us first consider those which belong to the so-called characteristic type, which, until a recent date, received more than its share of attention,—that which is seen only in the taller skeletons. Their foreheads, says Rolleston, were ‘sometimes... especially in cases where the whole skull and skeleton are marked by great strength and even ruggedness, markedly sloping’.1902 Their supraciliary ridges were often extraordinarily prominent. ‘The eyebrows,’ says the same authority, ‘must have given a beetling and probably even formidable appearance to the upper part of the face, whilst the boldly outstanding and heavy cheek bones must have produced an impression of raw and rough strength.... Overhung at its root, the nose must have projected boldly forward.’[1903] These men were, in some instances, extremely prognathous:1904 their teeth were often extraordinarily large;[1905] and, to quote Thurnam, ‘the prominence of the large incisor and canine teeth is so great as to give an almost bestial expression to the skull.’[1906] The reader who scans the illustrations in Crania Britannica and in Canon Greenwell’s British Barrows will, however, see that the brachycephalic skulls even of the taller skeletons are not all of the same type. Moreover, some few of the Round Barrow skulls combine the contour of the characteristic brachycephalic skull of the British Bronze Age with dolichocephaly;1907 and this is one of the facts which tend to prove that in certain parts of England the brachycephalic invaders intermarried with the people whom they found in possession. In the East Riding of Yorkshire, indeed, it would seem that the old race and the new were as completely intermingled as the modern population. Dr. William Wright tells us that in a collection of 80 skulls, taken from round barrows and preserved in the Mortimer Museum at Driffield, ‘almost all the varieties of cranial shape met with in Europe are represented.’ Their cephalic indices ranged from 69 to 92; and, says Dr. Wright, ‘it is doubtful if it is possible to find a materially more mixed series of skulls in a community of to-day.’1908 Dr. Wright, however, does not believe that the skulls of apparently hybrid form prove intermarriage between the invaders and the old neolithic population, or that the former were purely brachycephalic. ‘To grant this,’ he argues, ‘one must believe that a pure round-headed race could have made its tardy progress across Europe unmixed,—an assumption which to my mind is incredible.’1909 Has the doctor forgotten that ten male skulls, found in short cists in and near Aberdeenshire and evidently assignable to the end of the Neolithic or the beginning of the Bronze Age,1910 were all brachycephalic, and that nine of them belonged to the same pure type.1911 Has he forgotten that the round barrow skulls of Wiltshire were mainly brachycephalic? Has he ever walked over the mountains of Auvergne? Very likely the round-headed race which he has in mind did not make its way across Europe unmixed; but the mixture did not greatly diminish the roundness. Very likely when it reached Britain it included a few long-heads; but the contrast between the uniformity in Wiltshire and the diversity in East Yorkshire suffices to disprove the doctor’s theory.

Some of Dr. Wright’s brachycephalic specimens belonged to a type which is quite different from the ‘characteristic’ Round Barrow type, and is also common to almost all the short Welsh and Scottish skeletons mentioned above.1912 These skulls are generally broader than those of the other kind. The ten found in Aberdeenshire and its neighbourhood ranged between 80.8 and 92.3, their average index being 85.39;1913 while those of Glamorganshire ranged between 81.7 and 86, and yielded an average of 84.2.1914 Not one of these skulls is prognathous:1915 all are high as well as round and broad: the supraciliary ridges are only slightly developed: the cheek bones are not prominent: the face is both broad and short; and the lower jaw is small.1916

Who were the brachycephalic people of the round barrows and the short cists, and whence did they come? Those who have attempted to solve these problems have generally had in mind only the tall round-heads, whether their skulls belonged to the characteristic type or showed signs of crossing with the other. Wherever the short people came from, their ethnical affinities are certain: they belonged to the so-called Alpine type of Central Europe, of which the French Grenelle race were a branch. Let us for the present confine our attention to the others. To the questions which I have asked at least six different answers have been given:—that they were Goidelic Celts; that they were Belgae; that they were Finns; that they came from Denmark or the Scandinavian peninsula; that their original home was Dalmatia; and, lastly, that they may be traced back to the valley of the Rhine.1917 But the view which has been repeated by almost every recent writer is that they were Goidels.1918

1-2. The Goidelic theory and the Belgic (which I ought perhaps to apologize for noticing) may be considered together; for if any argument tells in favour of the latter, it tells as much or more in favour of the former.

Thurnam, who does not trouble himself about the distinction between Goidelic and Brythonic Celts, points out that ‘extremely brachycephalic skulls have been exhumed from many of the French chambered tumuli’;1919 that seven skulls with cephalic indices of 80 and upwards from a dolmen near Senlis, which is in the territory that was occupied by the Belgae, ‘have much resemblance to those from the round barrows’;1920 and that three skulls with indices of 80, 80, and 85 respectively from a sepulchral grotto in the Belgic department of the Oise are ‘very similar in general character to the short skulls from the round barrows’.1921 He argues that of the cranial types represented by the peoples of the long barrows and the round barrows respectively ‘one at least must be Celtic’:1922 he points out that in the cremation interments which have been discovered in round barrows ‘the appearances are consistent with what we are told of the funerals of the Gauls... by Caesar and Pomponius Mela’;1923 and his general conclusion is that the Round Barrow people were ‘an offshoot through the Belgic Gauls from the great brachycephalic stock of Central and North-Eastern Europe’.1924 Finally, Professor Rhys maintained in 18901925 (it would be rash to assume that his opinion is unchanged) that the Round Barrow race belonged to the Brythonic group, who, he asserted, being comparatively broad-headed, were less pure than the Goidels.

According to Professor Boyd Dawkins, the Round Barrow race must have been Goidels, and not Wends, Finns, or Slaves, because the latter would not have subsequently retreated eastward ‘against the current of the Celtic, Belgian, and German invasions’;1926 while the late Canon Isaac Taylor1927 affirmed that the skulls of the well-known ‘Sion type’, which by some anthropologists are believed to have belonged to the Celtic Helvetii, resembled those of the round barrows.

Now the view that the tall brachycephalic people of the round barrows were the Belgae is so utterly absurd that it is difficult to conceive how writers who posed as authorities on ethnology could ever have entertained it.1928 If some benighted classical scholar had ascribed the Copernican system to Ptolemy, one may imagine how he would have been derided by scientists; yet such a blunder would not have been different in degree from that which Thurnam committed and Huxley approved. For the Belgic invasion began, at the earliest, in the third, and, as Professor Rhys himself maintains,1929 in the second century before the Christian era; and the first invaders of the Round Barrow race landed in Britain, at the latest, about 1400 B.C.,1930 and probably several centuries earlier. The argument which Thurnam bases upon the alleged similarity between Round Barrow skulls and some which have been exhumed from French dolmens has no weight. To begin with, the theory that any Celtic-speaking people invaded Gaul in the Neolithic Age is contrary to historical and archaeological evidence;1931 and, assuming that they did, the resemblance between the skulls to which Thurnam refers and most of those of the tall Round Barrow skeletons is purely superficial. Any one may convince himself of this who will take the trouble to compare the illustrations of Round Barrow skulls in Crania Britannica with those in Crania Ethnica; and Thurnam himself in more than one passage1932 admits, indeed emphasizes, the distinction. Even Broca1933 denied that there was any physical affinity between the tall brachycephali of the round barrows and the [so-called] ‘real Celts of Gaul’; and, as we shall see presently, by the latter he simply meant the brachycephalic people, descended from neolithic ancestors, that formed the substratum of the population whom Caesar called Celtae. Similarly Dr. Beddoe truly says that the [characteristic] Round Barrow skulls resemble those of Borreby in the Danish island of Falster, rather than those of Broca’s Celtae.1934 It is true indeed, as we have seen, that some of the Round Barrow skulls resemble some of the neolithic French skulls; but, speaking generally, the former are far more rugged and in every way more strongly marked than the latter.1935

More striking, however, than the contrast between the skulls of the characteristic Round Barrow skeletons and those of the French brachycephalic neolithic race is the discrepancy in stature. The average height of the former was, as we have seen, on the lowest computation, 5 feet 8⅖ inches; that of the latter was very little over 5 feet.1936 Moreover, while the brachycephalic Finns and Danes and the few modern brachycephalic inhabitants of England are generally tall or moderately tall and fair, those of France and Central Europe are generally not only short but dark.1937

The argument that since the Long Barrow skulls were pre-Aryan, those of the round barrows must have been Celtic, begs the question. As we shall see presently, there are other skulls in museums, which belong to neither type, and which undoubtedly are Celtic. What reason is there to deny that the earlier brachycephalic invaders who were buried in round barrows may, as Mr. C. H. Read1938 reasonably suggests, have been pre-Aryan? The British Celts of the later Bronze Age were doubtless cremated; and therefore their skulls are not forthcoming. And if the resemblance between the cremation interments of the round barrows and those described by Caesar proved that the former were all Celtic, it would also prove that they were Greek!1939

In answer to Professor Boyd Dawkins it may be said that if the tall Round Barrow race were not Finns or Slaves, it does not follow that they were Goidels. And supposing that they were Finns or Slaves, why should it be necessary to assume that they ‘subsequently retreated eastward against the current of the Celtic, Belgian, and German invasions’? Or that they retreated eastward at all? The ‘Iberian’ immigrants certainly did not retreat ‘against the current’ of the Round Barrow invaders: they retreated, if at all, to the remoter parts of Britain. The argument that the Round Barrow skulls resemble those of the Sion type is disposed of by merely comparing the measurements and the illustrations of the two series. The Sion type, as Rolleston1940 says, ‘corresponds to many of our long-barrow skulls,’ and is not brachycephalic but dolichocephalic or mesaticephalic:1941 there is no proof that it was that of the Helvetii;1942 and, as I have pointed out elsewhere,1943 there is strong reason to believe that the Helvetii did not appear in Switzerland before the Iron Age.

So much for the arguments which have been adduced in favour of the popular theory. There are facts which absolutely disprove it. First, there is no evidence that the brachycephalic people who built round barrows ever reached Ireland, at least in appreciable numbers; for not a single skull of the characteristic Round Barrow type has ever been found there, and only four brachycephalic skulls which can be referred to prehistoric times.1944 Yet it is needless to say that since a time long anterior to the Roman invasion of Britain Ireland has been one of the principal abodes of the Goidelic stock. Secondly, it is, as we have seen, in the highest degree probable, if not certain, that the Round Barrow race first invaded Britain in the Neolithic Age. Let us, however, for the sake of argument, accept Professor Boyd Dawkins’s assumption that their advent synchronized with the beginning of the British Bronze Age. Now, according to Professor Montelius, the Bronze Age in this country began about 2000 B.C.; according to Sir John Evans,1945 six centuries later. It is impossible to fix with certainty the date of the earliest Celtic invasion of Britain; but such historical evidence as we possess points to the conclusion that it was not earlier than the seventh century before the Christian era.1946 M. Salomon Reinach has argued that a Celtic-speaking people appeared in North-Western Gaul in the ninth century,—the earliest date which has ever been proposed by any scholar; but his view is based on the mere conjecture that κασσίτερος,, the Greek word for tin, which occurs in Homer, is of Celtic derivation.1947 M. d’Arbois de Jubainville, indeed, who adopts this conjecture,1948 supposes that the Celts actually landed in Britain as early as the ninth century before Christ; but even if we accept his chronology, we are confronted with the fact that the very earliest date that has been assigned on historical or linguistic grounds for the first Celtic invasion1949 is four or five centuries later than the latest, ten or eleven centuries later than the earliest date which has been assigned by archaeologists for the commencement of the Bronze Age in Britain. Yet anthropologists and antiquaries will go on repeating the dogma that the builders of the round barrows, who, at the latest, began to arrive in Britain at the commencement of the Bronze Age, were Goidelic Celts. The moral is that anthropologists and antiquaries would not be worse equipped if they enlarged the sphere of their studies.

Again, the view that a Celtic-speaking people invaded Britain at the close of the Neolithic or the beginning of the Bronze Age implies that Celtic and Latin, the nearest of kin in the Aryan family of languages, had become differentiated long before the Neolithic Age came to its end. Would any philologist who knew the rudiments of archaeology sanction a theory so preposterous?1950

The foregoing arguments apply equally to the short men whose remains have been found in the greatest purity in North-Eastern Scotland. The race to which they belonged began to arrive in Gaul very early in the Neolithic Age:1951 they themselves landed in Britain before its close. Whoever they may have been, they were neither Goidels nor Belgae nor Brythons of any tribe.

Finally, although I am aware that I am about to tread upon thorny ground, I affirm that there is not the slightest reason to doubt that the Celtic invaders of Britain, in so far as they were descended from the Celtic-speaking people who conquered Gaul, were not a brachycephalic but a dolichocephalic or mesaticephalic people. I have already argued in favour of this thesis in a dissertation on ‘the Ethnology of Gaul’,1952 and I will now adduce fresh evidence in its favour. But first let me make my meaning perfectly clear. I do not mean that the Celtic invaders of Britain were all of the same type. On the contrary, I assume that the dominant race had intermixed and intermarried, before they embarked from the Continent, with descendants of the neolithic stocks. I do not mean that even the invaders who introduced the Celtic language into Gaul, even those who beat the Romans on the Allia, were homogeneous. Dr. Beddoe, as I have remarked elsewhere,1953 warns us not to believe that there was ever a period when, for example, all the Caledonians were red-haired. I only mean that among the Celtic-speaking conquerors of Britain dolichocephaly, as well as tallness and fairness, was a prevailing characteristic.

Thurnam1954 asserted that ‘we may ask in vain for a series of ancient dolichocephalic skulls which, on satisfactory archaeological grounds, can be assigned to the immediately pre-Roman, and therefore to the Celtic period, either in England or in France’. Let us consider England first. Now it happens that the skulls of the ‘Late Celtic’ period, or Early Iron Age, which have been found in this country are almost all either dolichocephalic or mesaticephalic.1955 Canon Greenwell,1956 it is true, explains this fact by the assumption that ‘the intruding round-headed people... were gradually absorbed by the earlier and more numerous [Long Barrow] race’. ‘In this way,’ he says, ‘it appears to me that we may account for the skull type of the Early Iron Age without the necessity of requiring any immigration into Britain or its conquest after the time of the presumed occupation by the bronze-using round-headed people,’ &c. But that necessity is imperative. Had Canon Greenwell momentarily forgotten his Caesar? The immigration of the Belgae took place, at the earliest, in the third century B.C., many centuries after the ‘occupation by the bronze-using round-headed people’. It is true that some of the British skulls which belong to the Late Celtic period are of the same type as those of the Long Barrow race:1957 but this only proves that the Long Barrow race survived; and others are of a type which, as Rolleston says, is ‘entirely wanting... in the series from the long barrows’.1958 Unfortunately, however, the Late Celtic skulls which have been found in Britain are comparatively few;1959 and hardly any of them can be assigned with certainty to the Brythonic invaders.

In France, on the other hand, the skulls of the corresponding period are very numerous; but few of them have been measured. Those few, however, confirm my argument. They belonged with very few exceptions to tall mesaticephalic or dolichocephalic men; and two of them may be seen in Salles IX and X of the Musée de St. Germain, near Paris, the former having been buried with his war-chariot, iron helmet, and long iron sword. The mean index of twenty-seven adult male skulls of this type, found in tumuli of the Early Iron Age in the department of the Marne, was 78.49; but Broca, who has described them, maintains that the index of skulls of the purest ‘Kymric’ (or, to use the term which is now in vogue, ‘Galatic’) type would be considerably lower; for, he argues, as the Gauls of the Marne lived very near the frontier of the Celtae, they must have intermarried with the brachycephalic people who formed the great majority of that group of tribes.1960

Again, in a recent article on tumuli of the Early Iron Age in the department of the Côte-d’Or, Dr. Hamy points to the noteworthy fact that two brachycephalic skulls, belonging to descendants of an earlier race, were found ‘among the dolichocephali who predominated in that population’;1961 and in a paper which he has just published on the earliest Gallic invaders of the Iron Age he shows that the cephalic indices of the available skulls from the Châtillonnais and the arrondissement of Beaune range between 73.1 and 76.59, while the average stature was 1 metre 75.7, or just over 5 feet 9⅛ inches.1962

The prevalent view in this country is, I am aware, that the Celts were a brachycephalic people; but it is begotten of sheer confusion of thought. Professor Ripley1963 remarks that ‘there is practically to-day a complete unanimity of opinion among physical anthropologists, that the term Celt, if used at all, belongs to the brachycephalic darkish population of the Alpine highlands’; and he adds that the only dissentient is M. G. de Lapouge.1964 But Dr. Beddoe,1965 whom he counts among the professors of the orthodox faith, has emphatically recorded his opinion that, at the time of the Roman conquest, the Celtic-speaking people of Southern Britain ‘partook more of the tall blond stock of Northern Europe than of the thick-set, broad-headed dark stock which Broca has called Celtic’; and the ‘unanimity’ (which is far from being ‘complete’) upon which Professor Ripley pins his faith is due partly to misunderstanding or misinterpretation of Broca’s famous essay, Qu’est-ce que les Celtes, partly to the desire of establishing a uniform connotation, and partly to the fact that some physical anthropologists have neglected to supplement their scientific researches by the study of classical texts. Broca found the term ‘Celt’ used in a multiplicity of senses, and he attempted to put an end to confusion by attaching to it one limited, conventional, and, as we shall see, misleading signification. When, in the essay to which I have just referred, he endeavoured to prove that the Celts were a dark brachycephalic people, he expressly limited the term ‘Celts’ to the population of that part of Gaul which, according to Caesar,1966 was inhabited by ‘a people who call themselves Celts and whom we [the Romans] call Gauls’. ‘There is no proof,’ he insists, ‘that the existence in the British Isles of a people bearing the name of Celts has ever been authoritatively affirmed’:1967 according to him, the invaders of Britain who spoke the so-called Celtic languages were the Belgae,1968 for he knew nothing about Goidels or pre-Belgic Brythons; and, although he allowed himself to be persuaded that the tall Round Barrow race spoke Celtic, he denied ‘that there is any other affinity except that of language between the brachycephali of the round barrows and the real Celts of Gaul’.1969 When he insisted that ‘the Celts’ were a dark brachycephalic people, he did not mean that darkness and brachycephaly were characteristic of the conquerors who introduced the Celtic language into Gaul: he meant that they were characteristic of the great mass of the mixed population whom Caesar called Celtae,1970 who were in the main descended from neolithic invaders, and whose uppermost stratum, so to speak, consisted of invaders whom Broca, speaking as a physical anthropologist rather than a philologist, called ‘Kimris’.1971 That the name Celtae did not belong to the people of Gaul until it was introduced by these Celtic-speaking ‘Kimris’ is evident from the fact that it belongs to the Celtic tongue:1972 in other words, the Celts, anthropologically speaking, were originally identical with the invaders who introduced the Celtic language first into Germany and then into Gaul.1973 These invaders were tall and mesaticephalic or dolichocephalic; and the Celtic-speaking conquerors of Britain belonged to the same stock.

‘The radical errors in Broca’s definition of the “Celts of history” [so I wrote some years ago1974] are these:—first, he calmly assumes that no classical writer’s testimony, except Caesar’s, is of any value; and secondly, he fails to see that Caesar, by saying that the people who called themselves “Celts” were called by the Romans “Gauls”, makes it as clear as noon-day that for him and for his countrymen, as for Polybius and Pausanias, the words “Celt” and “Gaul” were synonymous. Broca admits that the older population of Gallia Celtica was conquered by men of the same race as the Gauls or Celts who captured Rome. Therefore it is absolutely certain that the Celtae of Transalpine Gaul were called after their conquerors. The truth is that Broca, while he aimed at putting an end to confusion, only made confusion worse confounded. Moreover, throughout his discussion, he simply ignores the Helvetii, who, according to Caesar, were included among the Celtae.’

Since the foregoing paragraph was written, I have lighted upon a passage1975 in which Broca himself justifies my argument and uses the word ‘Celt’ in the sense which I attach to it. The Celtae of Gaul, he remarks, ‘were already mixed before the arrival of the Kimris [or Gallo-Brythonic invaders], since the name [Celtae] under which they appeared for the first time in history had been imposed upon them by the conquering race of the Celts properly so called, which, like the Kimris and the Germans, came from the east, and, like them, was dolichocephalic.’1976

Professor Ripley appeals to the German ethnologist, Johannes Ranke,1977 whose arguments, he insists, are ‘decisive’. But any one who will take the trouble to read the chapter which Ranke devotes to the Celts will see that his argument does not support Professor Ripley’s contention. Virchow, he reminds us, has pointed out that wherever the Celts are known to have penetrated dark peoples are now to be found. But, as he fully admits, Virchow himself said, ‘I am not on that account inclined to assume that the original Celts were... dark,’ and reminded his readers that the ancient writers described the Celts as fair. Ranke points out, further, that wherever the Celts originally dwelled in Central Europe we now find the people not only dark but also brachycephalic; but at the same time he warns us to bear in mind that in certain Celtic districts of Britain dolichocephaly is unmistakable, and that there is evidence that on the Continent the Celtic invaders found a dark brachycephalic people in possession. In other words, Ranke does not commit himself to any theory as to the physical characters of the Celts properly so called,—the invaders who introduced the Celtic dialects into Germany, Gaul, Britain, and other countries which they subdued. The reader will also bear in mind that the writers who identify the tall brachycephalic Round Barrow race with the Goidelic Celts unanimously maintain that they were fair.

That the Celtic-speaking invaders of Gaul and Britain were commonly dolichocephalic or mesaticephalic is not only attested by the skulls of warriors of the Iron Age, but is either attested or at least not disproved by the results of modern observations of existing Celtic-speaking peoples1978 and of the country which was formerly inhabited by the Gallic Belgae.1979 When Sergi1980 tells us that the Gauls who captured Rome were ‘composed of brunet Celts and blond Teutons’, he makes an assertion which, as it is absolutely unsupported by any evidence, calls for no refutation; and it would be useless to ask him who were the ‘blond Teutons’ who were the ancestors of the red-haired Gauls of the Perthshire Highlands.1981 As Dr. Beddoe1982 puts it, the Gauls of Scotland are probably descended from ‘Iberians’ crossed with ‘a long-faced, harsh-featured, red-haired race, who contributed the language and much of the character’.1983

3. The late Mr. Charles Elton,1984 referring to Professor A. H. Sayce’s Science of Language,1985 affirmed that ‘a Finnish idiom has been traced in several of the British languages’, and inferred that the tall builders of the round barrows were Finns. The idiom in question may, for aught that I know, have been traced by some philologist who had determined to find it, but not by Professor Sayce nor by any one to whom Professor Sayce refers. Mr. Elton’s argument is as obsolete as that which Professor Rhys founded upon his imaginary tracing of Basque in the language of the Picts.

4. Much may be said for the theory of the late Professor Rolleston, that the tall people of the round barrows came from Denmark or some of the adjoining islands, if it be duly modified. On the coast near Flamborough Head are remains of earthworks, which, as has been demonstrated by General Pitt-Rivers, who excavated them, were erected by invaders fighting their way inland; and, as he remarks, ‘it is unlikely that any but Northmen should have landed in this spot.’1986 Thurnam himself admits that there is ‘a great resemblance’ between the characteristic Round Barrow skulls and those from ‘the Giants’ Chamber at Borreby [in the island of Falster], and from other Scandinavian megalithic tombs’;1987 and his testimony is confirmed by Rolleston1988 and Dr. Beddoe.1989

Dr. A. H. Keane1990 argues, in opposition to Rolleston’s view, that if any of the Round Barrow invaders had come from Scandinavia, ‘they must have spoken some Low German dialect, of which there are no clear traces in the tribal and place-names of the Bronze Age.’ The answer is, first, that, as Mr. C. H. Read1991 suggests, they may have spoken not a Low German but a pre-Aryan dialect; and, secondly, that we know absolutely nothing about either the tribal or the place-names of Britain in the Bronze Age. Assuming that Low German tribal or place-names existed in Britain before the Celtic invasion, they would for the most part have been superseded by Celtic names, just as the Celtic invaders of Gaul generally substituted their own tribal and place-names for those of their predecessors, and just as in certain parts of Scotland Celtic names of rivers gave place to Norse names.1992

5. Messrs. J. Gray and J. F. Tocher infer from their observations of the physical characteristics of the population of West Aberdeenshire that ‘a tall, broad-headed, dark-haired, light-eyed people’, whom they regard as ‘the descendants of the men of the Bronze Age’, formerly inhabited Aberdeenshire, but were driven inland by later blond immigrants, who were shorter and had narrower heads, and whom they identify with North Germans.1993 The resemblance of the tall dark people to modern Dalmatians1994 is, they say, ‘significant when taken in conjunction with the fact that bronze first came into the British Isles from South-East Europe.’

‘The fact!’ But is it the fact? Archaeology has certainly shown that Britain, in the Bronze Age, was commercially connected with Northern France, which, as Mr. C. H. Read1995 says, was ‘supplied to a certain extent from Italy’. But no archaeologist supposes that bronze was carried all the way from Italy, still less from Dalmatia, into Britain or even into Northern France by Italians or Dalmatians. It came through the methods of primitive commerce. Moreover, as we have already seen,1996 ‘the men of the Bronze Age,’ by whom Messrs. Gray and Tocher mean the tall brachycephalic people of the round barrows, were still in their Stone Age when they began to invade Britain. A direct immigration from the coasts of the Adriatic into West Aberdeenshire or even Southern Britain is inconceivable; and if it had taken place gradually across the Continent, we should find that the immigrants had left traces of their presence on the way, which is not the case. Notwithstanding the thoroughness with which Messrs. Gray and Tocher conducted their investigation, I fear that it throws no new light upon the ethnology of Ancient Britain. After the successive invasions and immigrations, the internal migrations, and the intermarriages of 3,000 years, it is utterly impossible to establish by dint of even the most elaborate census of a living population the fact that the people of the Bronze Age even in West Aberdeenshire were ‘tall, broad-headed, dark-haired, and light-eyed’; and if they were, why only in West Aberdeenshire?

6. The Honourable John Abercromby maintains that the brachycephalic invaders, or some of them, came at the beginning of the Bronze Age or in the period of transition between the Neolithic Age and the Bronze Age from the neighbourhood of the middle Rhine or from some intermediate district between it and Britain.1997 Remarking1998 that ‘the recorded finds of the last hundred years are sufficient to establish the fact that the beaker [or drinking-cup] is the oldest form of fictilia in the Bronze Age of this country’, he argues that the immigrants who introduced the oldest drinking-cups of the kind which Thurnam designated as ‘type β’ must have belonged to a tribe who at one time lived in the valley of the Rhine, because between British and Rhenish specimens of this type ‘there is a substantial agreement’ both in form and ornament, which ‘seems too great to be the result of pure accident’; and he points out1999 that ‘the type exists not only in the central Rhine, but also near its mouth’, though the intermediate stages cannot be traced. The Rhenish cups belong to the Neolithic Age; and it seems impossible to prove that the earliest British examples were not made before any objects of bronze were manufactured in or introduced into Britain:2000 but Mr. Abercromby has certainly established a very strong probability in favour of the locality to which he refers their origin.2001

The great mistake that has been made in discussing the question is the not uncommon assumption that the brachycephalic immigrants who buried their dead in round barrows arrived in Britain at one time and came from one place. Some of them certainly appeared before the end of the Neolithic Age: others may have introduced bronze implements or ornaments; others doubtless came, in successive hordes, during the course of the Bronze Age. Some of those who belonged to the Grenelle race, who certainly came from Eastern Europe and possibly from Asia,2002 and whose centre of dispersion was the Alpine region,2003 may have started from Gaul;2004 others could have traced their origin to some Rhenish tribe; and I am inclined to believe that those who belonged to the characteristic rugged Round Barrow type crossed over, for the most part, from Denmark or the outlying islands. That the first Celtic-speaking invaders landed in Britain before the end of the Bronze Age I do not deny; and if they came from that part of Gaul which was inhabited by the Celtae, I have no doubt that many of them were brachycephalic. But it is nevertheless certain that among these invaders the dominant element, who were Celtic in blood as well as in speech, and whose physical type was that described by the ancient writers, were not brachycephalic but mesaticephalic or dolichocephalic. And if I am asked where the Celtic skulls of the later British Bronze Age are to be found, I answer, Nowhere: they were reduced to ashes by cremation.2005

It is interesting to find that, according to Huxley, of the skeletons that were found in the famous Heathery Burn Cave, near Durham, which was inhabited in the closing period of the Bronze Age, not one belonged to either of the brachycephalic types, but all to ‘the same race of rather small and lightly-made men with prominent superciliary ridges and projecting nasal bones’2006 which is represented by the river-bed skulls of England and Ireland.2007

IX. The Celts

1. Little can be added to what has been said in the previous section about the physical characteristics of the Celtic invaders of Britain. Some Celtic scholars, as we shall presently see,2008 deny that any Goidels reached this country before the Roman conquest; but, assuming that some did so, there is no reason to suppose that they differed much physically from the Brythons. If Strabo2009 was right in saying that the Britons generally were less fair-haired than the Gauls, the inference would seem to be that the Celtic invaders of Britain had intermarried more freely than those of Gaul with the descendants of the aborigines; nor would this inference be weakened by the fact that, according to the same authority,2010 they were conspicuously taller than their Gallic kinsmen.2011 I believe, however, that Strabo’s statements were based upon nothing more than his own observation of the few Britons whom he says that he himself saw in Rome, supplemented perhaps by hearsay evidence derived from Roman soldiers or traders who were not trained observers; and that his testimony is worth neither more nor less than that of Lucan, who speaks of ‘the fair-haired Britons’.2012 Dr. Beddoe2013 has concluded, from his observation of the modern inhabitants of ‘those parts of Scotland and the north of England where Kymric blood may well be supposed to remain in large proportion,’ that the Belgae who invaded Britain as well as those of Gaul were on the whole somewhat dark: but his arguments, which I have examined fully elsewhere,2014 do not prove that the dominant Celts among the Belgae were dark, but simply that, before they invaded Britain, they had become largely intermixed with an older dark population, and that, since they reached this country, they and their descendants have intermarried with people darker than themselves.2015

2. Professor Rhys has more than once changed his opinion about the Celtic invaders of Britain since he began to handle the subject. In the second edition of his Lectures on Welsh Philology2016 he argued that they were not ‘two distinct nationalities, speaking two distinct languages’; in other words, he maintained that the Goidelic and Brythonic dialects had been evolved within the British Isles after the Celts had entered them. In the preface to Celtic Britain, however, which was written in January, 1884, he recanted; and his old view is now obsolete. For many years past he has maintained that the earliest invaders were Goidels, or, as he now prefers to call them, Celticans;2017 and that the later comers were Brythons. But whereas until a recent date he held that the only Brythonic invasion was that of the Belgae, and that Pytheas, who visited Britain towards the end of the fourth century B.C., ‘is not likely to have found any Brythons here,’2018 he now holds, or at all events held a few weeks before the time when I am writing, that the first Brythonic invaders ‘appear to have settled here before the middle of the fourth century B. C., for Pytheas... gives indirect evidence to their presence’.2019 To this view I hope he will firmly adhere. There is, indeed, no direct evidence that any Brythonic immigrants landed in Britain before the Belgae. But indirect evidence there is; and that of two kinds. The first has been already noticed in the section on the Picts. There are good grounds for believing that the authority whom Diodorus Siculus followed in his notices of Britain was Pytheas.2020 Diodorus speaks of the British Isles as Πρετ(τ)ανικαὶ νῆσοι;2021 and the P in Πρετ(τ)ανικαί (if that reading is certain), shows that Pytheas learned the word from lips which spoke a Brythonic, or Gaulish dialect. M. d’Arbois de Jubainville asserts that his informants were Gauls:2022 but that is simply his opinion; it is open to any one to argue that Pytheas probably learned the name of the Britons as well as the facts which he reported about them and their country in Britain, and not in Gaul. Be this, however, as it may, it is, as we shall presently see, certain that during the earlier period of the Roman occupation, the greater part of England and a considerable part of Scotland were inhabited by Brythons; and, as we shall also see, it is extremely improbable that they were all of Belgic origin. The question of the chronological order of the various Celtic invasions is, according to Professor Rhys,2023 answered by the present geographical distribution of the Celtic-speaking peoples of the British Isles: ‘it may be regarded,’ he says, ‘as fairly certain that those who are found driven furthest to the west were the earliest comers.’ The argument might be sound enough (though the word ‘driven’ begs the question) if we were considering the British Isles as a whole, and not merely Britain;2024 and even those who maintain that there were no people of Goidelic descent in Britain in the time of Caesar could hardly answer Professor Rhys unless they assumed that the Goidelic invaders of Ireland came from Spain, or that they dared not risk a contest with the Southern Britons; for otherwise it is hard to believe that they would not have directed their immigration towards Britain, the nearer country.

Professor Rhys, in his Celtic Britain,2025 endeavours to trace the distribution of the Brythonic and Goidelic peoples, as he believes it to have existed at the time of the coming of the Romans; and in so doing he uses materials on which he founds another argument to show that there were Goidels in Britain at that time. These materials are Goidelic inscriptions which have been found in North Wales, in Cornwall, and in Devonshire:2026 but not one of them belongs to an earlier date than the fifth century of our era. With the exception of the districts in which they occur, of the greater part of Somersetshire and Dorsetshire, of South Wales and the adjoining parts of England which lie between the Severn and the Teme, and of Cumberland, part of Westmorland, the Isle of Man, Dumfries, Kirkcudbright, Wigtown, Ayrshire, Renfrew, and part of Lanarkshire, the professor regards the whole of Britain south of the Firths of Clyde and Forth as Brythonic; and he prints a list of proper names, most of which are certainly Brythonic, in support of this conclusion.2027 The northern part of the island he divides, for reasons which have been already examined, between Goidels and aboriginal tribes, whom he identifies with the Picts properly so called.2028 It will, however, of course be understood that when he speaks of Goidelic and Brythonic tribes, he means tribes who spoke the Goidelic and Brythonic dialects. The former he regards as mingled largely with the aborigines, and the latter with both Goidels and aborigines. But it is difficult to understand how he has been able to maintain that the Dumnonii of Cornwall and Devonshire were Goidels in the face of the fact that most of the British emigrants who invaded Brittany came from the Cornish peninsula,2029 bringing the name Dumnonii with them, and that he himself formerly insisted that the Dumnonii who inhabited what is now Renfrew and Ayrshire were Brythons.2030 I say ‘formerly’, because this is one of the many opinions which the professor has felt obliged to discard: ‘the southern portion’ of the Scottish Dumnonii have just been transformed by a stroke of the pen into ‘Goidels who adopted Brythonic speech’.2031 However, as M. d’Arbois de Jubainville says, referring to the inscriptions upon which Professor Rhys relies, ‘To conclude from the fact that five Goidels were buried, during the period which elapsed from about 400 to about 700 A.D., in the territory of the Dumnonii, that the entire population of that territory was Goidelic seems extremely rash;’2032 and, he asks,2033 ‘if they were Goidels, how came it that they brought a Brythonic dialect into Brittany?’ Further, he asks why Professor Rhys maintains that the Novantae of Galloway were Goidels when he admits that the Trinovantes of Essex were Brythons;2034 and the only answer which the professor vouchsafes to this question is that the name Novantae was ‘given them probably by Brythons’.2035 What are the grounds of his opinion, he does not say. I may add that while he explains2036 that ‘the consonantal combination of cs or x’ is Gaulish, that is to say, Gallo-Brythonic, he says2037 that it is ‘remarkable’ that ’most of the early names with x belong to districts which have before been pointed out as non-Brythonic’. When we look for these districts, we find2038 that they were those of the Taexali, the Vacomagi, the Scottish Dumnonii, the Selgovae, and Cumberland. When we ask on what grounds the inhabitants of these districts had been ‘pointed out as non-Brythonic’, we find2039 that the Taexali and the Vacomagi were Pictish, that is to say ‘no doubt’ aboriginal; that the Dumnonii, according to the professor himself,2040 were ‘undoubtedly Brythons’, and remained so until, discovering perhaps that he had inadvertently given his case away, he changed them by his enchanter’s wand into ‘Goidels who adopted Brythonic speech’;2041 and that the Selgovae are asserted to have been, like the Novantae, ‘in a great measure... most likely a remnant of the aboriginial inhabitants.’2042 Why? Because they were afterwards included under the name Atecotti, which ‘appears to have meant old or ancient’, and was ‘possibly given to them by the Brythons’.2043 Doubtless they were ‘in a great measure’ aboriginal, as were doubtless all the British tribes; but seeing that Uxellon, the name of a town in their country, is Gaulish, the natural conclusion is that their Celtic masters were not Goidels but Brythons.

3. Professor Kuno Meyer holds that ‘no Gael ever set his foot on British soil save on a vessel that had put out from Ireland’;2044 and his words are echoed by Dr. Macbain.2045 Professor Meyer points out that ‘we have the concurrent testimony of Irish and Welsh tradition that from the second century of our era till the sixth a series of partial conquests of Britain took place’.2046 Dr. Beddoe2047 has indeed argued that it is extremely improbable that ‘the Romans would have allowed the Irish Gael to acquire by violence possession of a large portion of one of their provinces’; and Professor Meyer, who admits the difficulty, says that he will not attempt to explain it away. He might have noted that the author of the panegyric which was addressed A.D. 296 to Constantius Chlorus2048 expressly affirms that such invasions did take place. Professor Meyer also points out that the Gaelic inscriptions which have been found in Southern Britain belong almost exclusively to South Wales, the quarter to which the invasions may be assumed to have been directed, very few having come to light in North Wales, Devonshire, and Cornwall.2049 On the other hand, it will be admitted that the record of these invasions is no proof that Goidels had not settled in Britain in pre-Roman times.

4. M. d’Arbois de Jubainville holds, as we have already seen,2050 that Goidels, or rather a people who spoke ‘the Celtic dialect from which Goidelic was evolved’,2051 were masters of the British Isles in the time of Pytheas, and that between his time and that of Caesar Britain was conquered by the Cymric Brittones. So far he is substantially in agreement with the view which, until a recent date, commended itself to Professor Rhys,2052 who, as the reader knows, now believes that there were two successive Brythonic invasions.2053 The more important differences between the two scholars lie partly in their views, which have been already examined, of the Pictish question; partly in the fact that M. d’Arbois is unable to accept the evidence which satisfies Professor Rhys that in Caesar’s time and later Goidelic tribes still remained in Western and Northern Britain. He holds that many of them had been driven by the Belgae into Ireland, and that in Britain they only survived as a vanquished people who had been forced to adopt the language of their Gaulish conquerors.2054 I am inclined to believe, from the analogy of Gaul,2055 that in Caesar’s time Goidelic was still spoken in remoter parts of the island.

5. Mr. Nicholson has recently attempted to prove that all his predecessors are entirely mistaken even on the few points on which they are agreed. According to him, the earliest Celtic invaders of the British Isles were Brythons, whom, however, he prefers to call Kymri; after them came a horde of Goidels; in the third century before Christ the Picts, who were also Goidels, invaded Scotland; and finally came the Belgae, who were Goidels too! The result was that ‘apparently the great majority of the tribes inhabiting Roman Britain were Goidels’,2056 although ‘of the later Kymric recovery and victory in Wales and some other parts there is no manner of doubt’.2057 It will, at all events, be admitted that a victory, however late, gained by a small minority, was no mean achievement.

How does Mr. Nicholson set about proving this revolutionary theory? He tells us that ‘on the map of Roman Britain’ he can only see one ‘certainly Kymric geographical name’2058—Pennocrucium (now Penkridge) in Staffordshire. The long lists of Cymric names which have been drawn up by Professor Rhys, Dr. Whitley Stokes, M. d’Arbois de Jubainville, and Dr. Macbain do not move him at all. When he is confronted with geographical, tribal, or personal names belonging to Pictland—names such as Argentocoxos, Epidii, Gartnait, the Ochil Hills, and the prefixes aber and pet—he either ignores them or, as his opponents would say, explains them away.2059 Professor Rhys’s list2060 is disposed of with the same breezy self-confidence. Corstopiton, Epeiacon, (Mons) Graupius, Leucopibia, Maponi, Parisi, Petuaria, Prasutagos, Rutupiae, Toliapis,—these names are either left out of account or explained as Goidelic by the simple method of affirming or ‘suspecting’ that the p in each case is ‘Indo-European’.2061 The reader will form his own opinion if he can; only he will bear in mind that the weight of authority is all on one side. When doctors disagree, the patient must decide for himself which is the quack.

So much for the assertion that the Goidels, who, according to Professor Kuno Meyer and Dr. Macbain, were non-existent in Britain at the time when the Roman conquest began, formed then ‘the great majority’ of the population. What is the evidence for the theory that they came later than the Brythons?

There is no doubt that the Celts who first entered Gaul were Goidels2062 (assuming that Goidelic was then a distinct dialect2063), and that the latest Celtic invaders of Gaul as of Britain were Belgae.2064 If the Belgae had been Goidels, we should then have to admit that Gaul was invaded first by Goidels, then by ‘Cymri’, and finally by Goidels again. Is this likely? And is it not likely that if Goidels were the first Celts who invaded Gaul, they were also the first who invaded Britain?

Mr. Nicholson offers the following arguments in favour of his theory. Remarking that the Menapii were a Belgic tribe, he says2065 that ‘the Isle of Man(n) [which Caesar calls Mona] is called Monapia by Pliny (iv, 103)’; and that the Gaelic dialect which is spoken in the island is evidence that its inhabitants in Pliny’s time were Goidels.

Now I ask, first, is it certain that Pliny’s Monapia, rather than Caesar’s Mona, was the name by which the Isle of Man was known to its own inhabitants? Is it not probable that the name Monapia, which is, at all events presumably, Brythonic, came to Pliny from a Brythonic source?2066 Secondly, assuming that the names Monapia and Menapii are etymologically connected, does it necessarily follow that Monapia was a name peculiar to the Belgae, seeing that the tribal name Ceutrones occurs not only in Belgic Gaul but in the Alps?2067 Thirdly, is Mr. Nicholson prepared to prove that the Isle of Man was not colonized by Goidels after it had received the name Monapia from Brythons? Lastly, since Mr. Nicholson himself affirms2068 that although the name Aremorici is ‘certainly Kymric’, it nevertheless ‘is no proof that the Aremoricans were Kymric’, why does he insist that the fact, if it is a fact, that Monapia was Goidelic proves that the Belgae were Goidels?

Again, he says that the Parisi, who lived near the mouth of the Humber, were Belgae,2069 and he believes that ‘their name preserves Indo-European p’.2070 But Caesar did not include the Gallic Parisii among the Belgae, and did include them among the Celtae.2071 Mr. Nicholson’s belief, that the p in their name is Indo-European, is not shared by any other Celtic scholar.

Thirdly, he argues that the Atrebates, who were certainly Belgae, were Goidels; for, he says,2072 ‘With one exception, no ogam-inscription has ever been found in these isles outside territory which is known to have been once in Goidelic occupation. The single exception is that of the stone found at Calleva Atrebatum (Silchester).’ But, according to Mr. Nicholson himself, ‘the great majority’ of the British tribes were Goidelic: yet in only a small minority of their territories are ogam inscriptions forthcoming; and that minority, with the possible exception of the Atrebates, is in the west of England. What then is proved by the solitary inscription at Silchester? The individual who erected it was doubtless a Goidel:2073 but if it is to be regarded as a proof that the Atrebates were Goidels, then the existence of synagogues in Great Britain proves the truth of that widespread delusion which Professor Tylor2074 has described as ‘abject nonsense’,—the ‘Anglo-Israel theory’.2075

Fourthly, Mr. Nicholson remarks2076 that between the Parisi and the Iceni, the name of whose king, Prasutagus,2077 he regards ‘as containing Ind.-Eur. p’, while all other Celtic scholars regard it as Brythonic, dwelled the Coritani.2078 ‘From their position on the coast,’ he says, ‘they should belong to the same Picto-Belgic family, and I submit that their name is simply Qṛtanoi, Cruitni.’ In other words, Mr. Nicholson submits that a single tribe, which he assumes to have been Belgic, called itself by the same name which, on his own showing,2079 had been given to the entire population of Great Britain2080 long before the Belgae set foot in the land!

6. I have set down the gist of the linguistic evidence which has been offered in support of the various theories about the Goidels and the Brythons in order that the reader may be able to form an independent judgement about its value. It goes without saying that on any particular question of Celtic etymology no opinion except that of a competent Celtic scholar is worth listening to: on most of the questions that concern us competent Celtic scholars differ widely among themselves: Professor Rhys differs from himself; and Mr. Nicholson, whose competence I neither affirm nor deny, differs from everybody. Even the lay reader who has studied the writings of Dr. Windisch, of Professor Rhys, of Dr. Whitley Stokes, of Dr. Macbain, of Mr. Nicholson, and of M. d’Arbois de Jubainville, and who has made much use of Alfred Holder’s Alt-celtischer Sprachschatz cannot but see how few of the etymologies that relate to ethnology are to be accepted as certain. It would of course be absurd to sneer at the services which philology has rendered to ethnology and history; nevertheless the fact remains that on almost all the fundamental questions of Celtic ethnology the philologists agree to differ. And, at the risk of appearing flippant, I cannot help saying that when I read some of Mr. Nicholson’s pages, when I see how M. Salomon Reinach demonstrates, with the approval of M. d’Arbois de Jubainville and of Professor Rhys, who for once find themselves in agreement, that κασσίτερος, the Greek word for tin, must be of Celtic derivation because the root cassi- is found in numerous Celtic names,2081 I ask myself whether some future philologist will not adduce the similarity between Tamesis and Tamesi, the name of a Mexican river, as a proof that the Celts once colonized Central America; whether he will not compare the name of Admiral Togo with that of the British prince, Togo-dumnos, and prove that ‘the Japanese Nelson’ was of Celtic extraction.2082

7. Caesar, in a familiar passage, states that ‘the maritime districts [of Britain are inhabited] by people who crossed over from Belgium to plunder and attack [the aborigines], almost all of them being called after the tribes from whom the invaders were an offshoot’.2083 It is, however, impossible to define the limits of the region which, in Caesar’s time and during the period that elapsed between the date of his departure and that of the Claudian conquest, was occupied by the Belgae. The only tribal names that indicate their presence are those of the Catuvellauni,2084 who, about the commencement of the Christian era, occupied a territory of uncertain area round Verulamium, or St. Albans, which included Hertfordshire, Middlesex, and probably parts of Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, and Northamptonshire; the Atrebates, who possessed parts of Hampshire and Berkshire; and the Belgae, whose chief towns, according to Ptolemy,2085 were Aquae Calidae, or Bath, and Venta, or Winchester.2086 Caesar’s words would certainly lead us to believe that the Cantii, the Trinovantes, and the Regni were also Belgic peoples, although their names do not occur in the list of the Belgic tribes of Gaul.2087 Professor Rhys indeed affirmed in the second edition of Celtic Britain2088 that ‘there is no evidence that the Cantii... should be considered Belgic’; and this statement is repeated in the edition which has recently been published: one feels therefore that the evolution of the professor’s views is quite normal when one reads in an intermediate volume, published two years ago,2089 that the earliest Belgic invaders of Britain were probably the Brittani,2090 and that the Brittani were probably the Cantii.

8. Finally, Dr. Macalister regards certain skeletons which have been found in the War Ditches of Cambridgeshire below layers that contained traces of late Roman occupation as Anglian2091; and it may be that they testify to a pre-Roman immigration from Northern Germany.

X. Conclusion

For the sake of clearness I shall summarize the results which this inquiry has attained. No human remains, except those of Bury St. Edmunds and Cattedown, which can be certainly attributed to the Quaternary Period have been found in Britain; but it is probable that the earlier inhabitants belonged in part to the Neanderthal stock, and that towards the close of the Palaeolithic Age they were joined by immigrants akin to the Chancelade people of the Lozère valley. There is no conclusive evidence that the earliest neolithic invaders found this island inhabited; but it has not been demonstrated that even here there was a ‘hiatus’ between the Old and the New Stone Age. The source of the first neolithic influx was probably in France, in the southern parts of which at all events the latest palaeolithic and the earliest neolithic inhabitants were akin. The neolithic invaders who built the long barrows of Southern Britain and the chambered cairns of Scotland, and many of whom built round barrows also, were a branch of the ‘Mediterranean’ race, and likewise came from France, perhaps in some cases originally from the Spanish peninsula; but if they are to be called ‘Iberian’ the term must be regarded as conventional. There is no evidence that they were related more nearly to the Basques than to some other branch of the Mediterranean stock.2092 They certainly spoke a non-Aryan language; and so probably did the earlier brachycephalic invaders, of whom the first comers landed in Britain before the end of the Neolithic Age. These invaders—the principal builders of the round barrows and the short cists—continued to arrive in successive hordes during the earlier part of the Bronze Age, some probably from Gaul, some from the Low Countries and the valley of the Rhine, and others, who settled in Yorkshire and Northumberland and perhaps in Derbyshire, from Denmark or Danish islands and possibly also from the Scandinavian peninsula. The brachycephalic Round Barrow skulls fall under two different types. Some resemble those of the French Grenelle race—in other words, the so-called Alpine race of Central Europe—and, like them, belonged to individuals of low stature; although the general superiority of the Bronze Age Britons in this respect is so great as to preclude the supposition that men of the pure Grenelle type invaded Britain in considerable numbers: others illustrate the rugged and, in some cases, almost brutal type which Thurnam and Rolleston have so forcibly described; and some of those of Yorkshire, especially Rudstone, and Northumberland exhibit these characteristics in such a degree that they may almost be grouped apart. The majority would seem to show that people of the two types intermarried, as they certainly did with the dolichocephalic neolithic population. The first Celtic invaders were Goidels, who certainly reached Ireland in the Bronze Age, and who may be supposed to have settled in Britain also before the time of Pytheas. The first Brythonic immigrants probably inaugurated the Iron Age in this country, and began to arrive a short time before the visit of Pytheas. They were succeeded by the Belgae, who, like them, came in successive hordes, the first probably in the third century before Christ. The Belgae and the other Brythons spread over the greater part of Southern Britain and many parts of Scotland. Both they and the Goidels were doubtless mixed with people of the ‘Iberian’ and Grenelle races with whom they had intermarried before they left the Continent; but the purer representatives of the two Celtic stocks—the descendants of the invaders who had introduced the Celtic languages into Gaul and of their continental kinsmen—belonged to a type different from both of the Round Barrow types, being not only tall and generally fair but dolichocephalic or mesaticephalic. A people characterized by dolichocephaly and low stature, who apparently were not descended from the Long Barrow race, but whose affinities are doubtful, were settled in the Early Iron Age in East Yorkshire, and, it would seem, nowhere else in Britain. The Picts of Romano-British history were a medley of tribes, among whom Celts were, as everywhere, predominant, but who probably included a greater proportion of the descendants of the neolithic and other pre-Aryan peoples than any other British group. It is possible that in the remoter parts of Pictland a non-Aryan dialect was still spoken when the Romans invaded Britain; but the pre-Aryan Picts as a whole had been Celticized, and the Celtic language had prevailed, although it had been largely modified by the speech with which it had come in contact. Everywhere in Britain the pre-Roman stocks have, in greater or less proportions, survived.2093 Few Englishmen, Welshmen, or Scotsmen, if their pedigrees could be traced back far enough, would not be found to count among their ancestors men of the type who were buried in long barrows, sturdy warriors of the Bronze Age, and Celts who fought against Caesar or were subdued by Agricola.

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The study of ethnology is as fascinating to its votaries, partly by reason of its very difficulty, as the attempt to determine the distances of the less remote stars must have been to Bessel, Henderson, and Struve; but I can sympathize with those to whom, in both cases, the quest of knowledge for its own sake appears equally unprofitable. They may well ask the ethnologist why he does not proceed to deduce from what he knows conclusions that would interest all students of history and of human nature. ‘There are few fields,’ says Professor Bury,2094 ‘where more work is to be done or where labourers are more needed than the Celtic civilisations of Western Europe. In tracing from its origins the course of western history in the Middle Ages, we are pulled up on the threshold by the uncertainties and obscurities which brood over the Celtic world. And for the purpose of prosecuting that most difficult of all inquiries, the ethnical problem, the part played by race in the developement of peoples and the effects of race blendings, it must be remembered that the Celtic world commands one of the chief portals of ingress into that mysterious prae-Aryan foreworld, from which it may well be that we modern Europeans have inherited far more than we dream.’ But when we have entered the ‘prae-Aryan foreworld’, how shall we map out its various provinces, and what clue shall we have gained to the solution of ‘the ethnical problem’? That is as complex as the problem, which theoretically may not be insoluble, of forecasting remote meteorological as accurately as astronomical phenomena; and its solution is more hopeless still. We want to know what contributions the various British races which we have identified made to the formation of the British character, which is so obviously different from that of any other nation, and which is, so to speak, the generalized manifestation of the characters of the English, Scottish, and Welsh peoples, and, descending the scale, of the characters of the inhabitants of every district, and finally of every man.2095 Again, we want to trace the manifold sources from which the ‘Celtic’ character, with the idiosyncrasies of which we are all more or less familiar, is derived. But the Celtic character is not everywhere the same. Study it in Wales, in Man, in the Scottish Highlands, in Ireland, in Cornwall, in France, and you will find that while it is Celtic everywhere, everywhere it is different;2096 that everywhere it has become what it is because it is compounded, in different degrees, not only of Celtic, not only of pre-Celtic and pre-Aryan, but also of post-Celtic elements. And all these elements have been modified and moulded by different geographical and climatic influences and by adventitious circumstances too numerous to be particularized and too elusive to be estimated.2097 Those who know Ireland well have observed that the character of Anglo-Irishmen, whose blood is neither more nor less Celtic than that of many Englishmen, has acquired a quasi-Irish tinge, which is discernible in their children even when they have been born and bred in England; and this sets us thinking, though we think in vain. We all know the passage in which Mommsen compares the Gauls to the modern Irish: the ethnologist knows enough to see that it is as misleading as it is brilliant; but he knows too little to attempt to rewrite it. Anthropologically speaking, the Gauls (I use the word in its most comprehensive sense) were very different from the modern and indeed from the ancient Irish; and if Mommsen’s analogy were more than superficial, we should be forced to conclude that the character of the Gauls, as it is revealed in ancient writings, was that of the dominant Celts, perhaps mostly Gallo-Brythonic, alone; and that the character of the Irish is simply that of Celts, mostly Goidelic, who were once but have long ceased to be dominant. Who will attempt to differentiate the respective shares of the pre-Aryan Long Barrow race, of the few representatives of the pre-Aryan Grenelle race who settled in this land, of the tall harsh-featured Round Barrow people, of the Goidels, and finally of the Brythons in building up the character which was to be further modified by the Roman, the Saxon, the Dane, the Norman, the Fleming, and aliens of every nationality, who each and all contributed something to a result which, influenced by the Continent, by the Far West, and now by the Far East, is still in process of evolution?