156 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



confirm this, even had we no history to which to turn. Our map 

 shows at a glance an island where once all the names of natural 

 features of the landscape and of towns as well were Celtic. This 

 primitive layer of names has been rolled back by pressure from the 

 direction of the mainland. It is a unit opposed to the combined 

 aggression of the Germanic tongues. 



The Jutes, Angles, and Saxons set the Teutonic ball a-rolling. 

 They came from the northern coast of Germany, from the marshes 

 and low-lying country of Friesland. These barbarians seem to have 

 followed close upon the heels of the retiring Romans, making their 

 appearance about the year 400 of our era. The whole island lay 

 open to them, and they made haste to overrun the best of it. They 

 avoided the fens and forests, to which the natives withdrew. With- 

 in two hundred years their influence had extended even to the utter- 

 most parts of Ireland, over the whole of which, as our map shows, 

 Saxon village names sporadically occur. The main center of their 

 occupation was in the southeast and middle of England, where, from 

 their first landings in Kent and Essex, they transformed the entire 

 country. Scotland also, south of Edinburgh, was infused with Saxon 

 blood if we may judge from our map. This district, from the river 

 Tees to the Forth, is in fact, as Taylor says, as purely English as any 

 part of the island. The Lothians were reputed English soil until 

 the eleventh century. Scotland begins racially not at the political 

 boundary of the river Tweed and Solway Firth, but at the base of 

 the Grampian Hills. The correspondence of a map of physical 

 geography and of Celtic place names in Scotland shows a relation of 

 cause and effect. 



This first inoculation with Teutonic blood was an unwilling 

 one. We have every evidence that the struggle was bitter to the 

 end. The tale of Saint Guthlac, a devout Briton, shows it. Dis- 

 turbed in his meditations one night by a great uproar outside his 

 hermit hut, he engaged himself in prayer for preservation until the 

 morning. The chronicler tells us that he was much relieved at day- 

 break by the discovery that the midnight marauders were only devils 

 and not Saxons. So strong was the race antipathy that the laws for- 

 bade a Briton from drinking from a cup touched by a Saxon till it 

 had been scoured with sand or ashes. Two hundred years of such a 

 struggle could not but modify the purity of the native stock, as we 

 shall be able to prove. 



About the year 850 came the second installment of the Teutonic 

 invasion at the hands of the Danes. They put an end to the inroads 

 of their Saxon predecessors by attacking them in the rear. Two 

 contrasted kinds of expeditions seem to have been dispatched against 

 the island. Those which besieged London and skirted the southern 



