The Presidents Address. 13 
Northern Asia, where their representative round-headed people still 
exist, retaining all their pristine idiosyneracies. These were the 
people whom Czsar speaks of as the Belgw, and whom he describes 
as a recent importation into Britain from the Continent. The short 
long-headed people were the Iberians, a race about whose origin less 
can be said with certainty. Whilst some have been so bold as to 
endeavour to trace them across the Atlantic, Professor Huxley 
brings them by way of Egypt from the Melanesian people of 
Australia and the Asiatic Isles. It seems likely, both from their 
stature and head-form, as well as from the scanty evidence of their 
colour in ancient histories, that they must have had affinity for 
some or other of the dark races of mankind which now occupy the 
Southern hemisphere. This much, at any rate, may be said without 
drawing too largely on our imaginative faculties, that the round 
head and light complexion is a northern, whilst the long head and 
dark skin is a southern peculiarity of the races which occupy the 
world at the present time, and that the two classes of skeletons 
found in the barrows may be those of branches of those two great 
primitive races which met and contended for the mastery in the 
British Isles at the time we are speaking of. Thus far the evidence 
derived from archzological sources is in complete harmony with 
tradition and with ethnology, but as we approach non-historic times, 
and attempt to deal with the unrecorded life of the Britons who 
were contemporaneous with our earliest histories, we find ourselves 
involved in some obscurity. The extension of the Roman Empire 
to Britain checked for more than three centuries the westerly 
drifting of nomades into Britain, and turned the current of migra- 
tion northward into Scotland and round to Ireland, so that at the 
end of that time the Britons found their Scandinavian enemies 
upon them from the north as well as from the east, One of the 
last acts of the Roman Emperors was to post a force on the east 
coast of England, which was called the Saxon shore, to repel these 
invaders, but no sooner was that force withdrawn than the full tide 
of westerly migration set in again direct upon Southern Britain 
with results that are well known to usall. During the comparative 
blank in history that follows that period we almost lose sight of the 
