THE HUMAN SPECIES. 307 



stones of enormous dimensions, generally in courses, 

 with more regularity ; but unlike them, they had fre- 

 quent subterranean passages, or galleries of mines 

 beneath their cities, the use of which is not yet under- 

 stood. They constructed their tombs usually in caves, 

 dug with skill and considerable beauty, so well con- 

 cealed and blocked up, that many have been discovered 

 only in latter times ; and these are found to have been 

 adorned with sculptures and paintings of no mean 

 artistical merit. The national mythology was however 

 totally distinct from the Greek or Roman, and approx- 

 imated, or was identical with that of other Finnic 

 tribes. Such were the Falsen of Etruria (Falaces), 

 pillar-gods, usually represented in pairs, once well 

 known to the pagan Scandinavians, the Laplanders, 

 and the Finnic Lithuanians, and still found in the 

 houses of the Tschutski of the north-east of Asia.* 



Being brave, and skilled in the arts of life and 

 war, although they had contests with, and expelled 

 the Kerkopes (xexpo^ xepxojcj; ? by the name evidently 

 a dwarfish race, which fled to Sicily), it is evident 



* See Ossian, Ca-lodin, " Like the pillars" of Lodin at 

 Sliva." Duan II. Were these perchance also the same as 

 the Finno-Teutonic Alces, Alkes, Alsen, brethren divini- 

 ties, with a priest clothed in woman's garments, and ho- 

 noured, without images, in a wood ? It may nevertheless 

 be suspected, that elk or stags' horns represented them, as 

 rein-deer horns are still used for idols by Laplanders and 

 Samoyeds. Ailsen, on the Weser, may have been a local 

 city for them, and the meaning might be perhaps taken from 

 Elke, each or both. Certainly not Castor and Pollux ; in 

 the classical view of these meteor gods* 



