38 
Tacitus says—The Caledonians were red-haired and large 
limbed, like the Germans. The Silures were curly-haired and 
dark complexioned, like the people of Spain. The Britons were 
like the Gauls. 
The Gauls and the Germans were much alike, always 
described as tall, with massive limbs, fair skins, fierce blue eyes, 
and hair the colour of which ranges from yellow to red. 
Thus, although we have three names assigned to the people 
of Britain—Britons, Caledonians, and Silures—there were only two 
stocks, a dark stock and a light stock, and the dark stock was 
predominant in the west of Britain, and the fair in the north and 
east. You will notice the distribution : it seems as if the dark stock 
had been driven westward by the invasion of the fair stock from 
the Continent. 
Both these stocks, dark and fair, spoke one language, but 
there were two dialects of it—Cymric spoken in Britain, Gaelic in 
Ireland. 
By this time I think you will probably have jumped to the 
conclusion from what I have told you before—that the dark stock 
are identical with the long-headed small men of the Stone Age; 
the fair stock with the round-headed bigger men of the Bronze Age. 
That I believe is so, and that the larger, stronger, fair stock, with 
the bronze weapons, had absorbed or driven into corners, their 
long-headed, dark predecessors, and that the language of the fair 
men had supplanted the language of the dark men. 
These two dark and fair stocks, whom the Romans found in 
Britain, together make the Celts (though the name Celt is often 
confined to the conquering fair stock), and the one language which 
they-spoke is the Celtic, with its two great dialectical divisions, 
the Cymric (or Welsh), and the Gaelic (or Irish). These linguistic 
divisions have nothing to do with the divisions into fair and dark. 
The abolished language of the dark stock had been Euskarian. 
Professor Huxley has a theory that the whole of Western 
Europe was once inhabited by a dark stock—Melanochroi, or 
dark whites, he calls them—and that they were gradually superseded 
by a fair stock—Xanthochroi, or fair whites—who came from the 
