HISTORY. 193 



cially the ancestors of the Welsh. But these names were never 

 applied by their contemporaries to the Britons ; nor can we by 

 their use determine the problem of the early migrations into 

 these islands. Strabo (Book IV.) indeed points out the physical 

 resemblances which they manifest to the Celts, and notices some 

 curious agreements in the habits of the two nations. The Cymri, 

 as they now appear in Wales, have not the physical characters 

 of the Cimbri, whose language may perhaps be reasonably 

 admitted to have been of the Teutonic class, while the Cymri 

 have preserved one branch of the Celtic tongue. All who spoke 

 this tongue in Gaul were not Celts, in the discriminating pages 

 of Csesar ; for he marks a special division of Celtic Gaul : nor 

 were all the Gauls light-haired and tall, as some of them are 

 described by Ammianus Marcellinus. The descendants of the 

 true Celts of Gaul are described by Desmoulins as dark-haired, 

 dark-eyed, and of the lower stature which Csesar expressly assigns 

 to them, in contrast with the Germanic tribes. 



It appears from Herodotus that the westernmost parts of 

 Europe were in his days inhabited by the ' KeXrot/ which, if a 

 Celtic word, may mean Foresters or Wopdlanders (from Coill, 

 Gellt, &c., denoting wood). The language of these people has 

 given names to mountains and streams through a considerable 

 part of Western Europe, and can be well exemplified in all parts 

 of Britain. But in Gaul and Britain, we are assured by the de- 

 scriptions of Csesar and Tacitus, that this language was spoken 

 by at least two different races of men the extremes of which 

 are the Iberi and Germani of Tacitus the black-eyed southern 

 and the blue-eyed northern types of the great western colonies 

 of man. From both of them the Belgse of the southern provinces 

 seem to be distinguished as an association rather than as a race, 

 for their language was the same. 



Of these very ancient nations, the first great wave of mi- 

 gration seems to have carried the Celtic tongue and printed it 

 on the natural features of the west of Europe ; the peculiar dia- 

 lects of successive settlers of different physical peculiarities were 



o 



