UPON THE SERIES OF PREHISTORIC CRANIA. 633 



round barrows of the bronze age lying peacefully in company with 

 brachy-cephali are indistinguishable from very many of the long 

 skulls found in long barrows together with implements of bone and 

 stone (see p. 527 supra), with the conclusion drawn from the 

 Celtic and other words signifying metal to the effect that all the 

 Celts were in possession of metal from the first time when they 

 came into Europe, unless we agree to speak and think of the Stone 

 Age as Preceltic. In other words, it is of importance to keep in 

 mind that a division of skulls into skulls of a Silurian and skulls 

 of a Cimbric type is, probably, not coincident with that division 

 of the Celtic race into Gaels and Cymry which is, I suppose, the 

 division usually adopted by historians and literary antiquarians. 

 The race which used stone and bone implements may, so far as the 

 naturalist's investigations teach him, have spoken either a Turanian 

 or an Aryan tongue ; what he sees in their skulls and their sur- 

 roundings impresses him with the notion of an antiquity which 

 may have given time enough and to spare for the more or less 

 complete disappearance of more than one unwritten language. The 

 bronze period again, though its term of duration in these islands 

 was no doubt almost infinitely shorter than that of the stone and 

 bone age, or rather ages, was yet long enough, as the antiquary 

 may assure the philologist, to admit of quite as great a differentia- 

 tion in any single language as that which exists between Gaelic 

 and Cymric at present, or to allow of the importation of more than 

 one already differentiated dialect in more than one not recorded 

 invasion. But if the bronze age may have been of very long 

 duration, and if the stone and bone age as represented to us in 

 the long barrows may have been of very much longer, the anti- 

 quary who may have explored one of these latter tumuli on a hill, 

 the sides and bottom of which may contain in their gravels the 

 implements, if not the bones, of still earlier races, knows and feels 

 that in dealing even with human phylogeny, he has to keep con- 

 stantly in mind in all his speculations that the permutations and 

 combinations of races possible in such lengths of time are conceiv- 

 ably and even practically infinite. The consideration of distance in 

 space when we are dealing with a question of geographical distribu- 

 tion is inseparably connected with the consideration of length of 

 time, and the great interval of space which separates Spain from 

 Great Britain should make us careful as to borrowing a name from 

 the tribes of one of those countries and imposing it upon a tribe in 

 another without the most definite historical or archaeological reasons. 



