8 JOHN EEADE ON 



Professor Boyd Dawkius, iu au article on " The British Lion,'" in which he deals, not 

 with the superb beast of heraldry, but with a genuine felis leo, says that a rough type of 

 humanity, the river-drift hunter, was coeval with that animal in Britain. The lion also 

 ranged over France, Belgium, Germany, and Italy, — in those regions, too, having man for 

 his rival iu the chase. But in the course of time a convulsive change in the geography of 

 northern and western Europe caused his retreat to more secure and genial hunting-grounds. 

 He was still at large in the forests south of Mount Hsemus until probably the beginning 

 of the Christian era. But what became of the man, his contemporary iu Britain ? There 

 are some who think that he managed to survive the great terrestrial shocks that frightened 

 the lion eastward, lingering on till the arrival of the Euskarian with whose blood his own 

 became merged, and who in afterdays, by union with the Celt, was to form the basis of 

 the British people. Others decline to accept him as an ancestor, though they are glad to 

 receive the Moor-like Euskarian in that capacity. The descendants of this last neolithic 

 occupant of Britain have been recognized in the so-called Black Celts of western Ireland 

 and Scotland, while their blood has also been traced in a more mixed condition in parts of 

 Wales, iu Lincolnshire, in East Anglia aud other districts of the United Kingdom. 



Mr. Horatio Hale, favouring the hypothesis, based on certain peculiarities of the Basque 

 tongue, that those ancient West-Europeans were of the same race as the Indians of America, 

 credits them with that love of freedom and free institutions which is so conspicuously 

 lacking in the character of the Eastern Aryans.' What a train of thought the suggestion, 

 if we could only admit its probability, would open up ! It is, however, hardly consistent 

 with the servile condition to which, according to our authorities, the light-skinned Celts 

 easily reduced their dusky forerunners — to be, in turn, themselves, master with serf, en- 

 slaved by the all-conquering Eomans. One effect of the coming of the latter was to amal- 

 gamate the Celtic and Euskarian elements, in those parts of the island where they stood 

 towards each other in the relation of a superior to a subject race. But in Ireland, the High- 

 lands of Scotland, parts of Wales, and elsewhere in Britain, the Euskarian blood continued 

 to predominate, and is still easily perceptible after the interfusions of so many centuries. 

 In fact, all through the successive changes which the population of the British Isles has 

 undergone, " each earlier element has everywhere persisted in the resulting mixture, and 

 it is probable that the numerical proportion of all the older elements, especially the Euska- 

 rian, is far greater than people generally at all imagine." ' 



If the Britons were a composite people, it could be easily shown that the Greeks, 

 the Eomans, the Teutons and the Slavs, were also made up of varioiis elements. In every 

 case we find a more or less obscure substratum of aborigines on which grew up, by col- 

 onization, invasion, rapt us, or captives taken iu tribal war, a more or less uniform popula- 

 tion. Time and circumstance, and the chances of human conflict and intercourse, 

 accomplish in that direction what would be impossible if human reason deliberately 

 iindertook the task. Contemplating the result, we may well say : — 



" There's a divinity that shapes our ends, 

 Kough-hew them how we will." 



' Contemporary Eeviefl' and I'opular Science Monthly, Nov. 1882. 



■■^ The Iroquois Book of Rites, p. 190. 



^ " Our Ancestors," by Prof. Grant Allen, iu Nature Studies, edited by K. A. Proctor. 



