1865.] BRITISH ASSOCIATION. 335 



than this, remains of the rudest human art ever seen are certainly 

 found buried with and are thought to belong to races who lived 

 contemporaneously with the mammoth and rhinoceros, and 

 experienced the cold of a Gallic or British winter, from which the 

 woolly covering of the wild animals was a fitting protection. 



Our own annals begin with the Kelts, if indeed we are entitled 

 to call by that historic name the really separate nations, Belgian, 

 Iberian, and Teutonic, whom the Koman writers recognise as 

 settlers in Britain (/) ; settlers among a really earlier family, our 

 rudest and oldest forefathers, who may have been, as they thought 

 themselves to be, the primitive people of the land (g). But 

 beyond the KeArat who occupied the sources of the Danube and 

 the slopes of the Pyrenees, and were known to Borne in later days, 

 there was present to the mind of the father of Grecian history a 

 still more western race, the Cynetse, who may perhaps be supposed 

 the very earliest people of the extreme west of the continent of 

 Europe. Were those the people, the first poor pilgrims from the 

 East, whose footsteps we are slowly tracing in the valleys of 

 Picardy and the south of England, if not on the borders of the 

 lakes of Switzerland ? Are their kindred still to be found among: 

 the Bhaetic Alps and the Asturian cliffs, if not amid the wilds of 

 Connemars, pressed into those mountainous recesses by the legions 

 of Borne, the spear of the Visigoth, and the sword of the Saxon ? 

 Or must we regard them as races of an earlier type, who had 

 ceased to chip flints before the arrival of Saxon, or Goth, or Kelt, 

 or Cynetian ? These questions of romantic interest in the study 

 of the distribution and languages of the families of man are part 

 of a large circle of enquiry which finds sympathy in several of 

 our sections, especially those devoted to zoology, physiology, and 

 ethnology. Let us not expect or desire for them a very quick, or, 

 at present, a very definite settlement. Deep shadows have 

 gathered over all the earlier ages of mankind, which perhaps still 

 longer periods of time may not avail to remove. Yet let us not 

 undervalue the progress of ethnological enquiry, nor fail to mark 

 how, within the period to which our recollections cling, the reve- 

 lations of early Egypt have been followed by a chronology of the 



(/) Gallic or Belgian on the south-east coast ; Iberian in South 

 Wales. German at the foot of the Grampians — (Tacitus, Vita Agricolse,) 



(g) " Britannicae pars interior ab iis incolitur, quos natos in insula 

 ipsa memoria proditum dicunt." — (Caesar, v. 12.) 



