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THE HUMAN SPECIES. -4S5 ^ 



who in different parts of Asia, Africa, and Europe, had 

 been in contact with nations far more advanced in the 

 arts of life, some perhaps with little delay, passing west 

 in their coracles the whole distance from the regions ol 

 Phoenicia and Carthage to Britain, brought dogmas, 

 such as the religious and moral dicta of the Druids 

 attest. They had no doubt possession of rudiments of 

 literature and reminiscences of science, and reaching 

 a home, rich in mines, not only became miners and 

 metallurgists as more than one line of their proge- 

 nitors had been in the east and in Spain but stimu- 

 lated by the example of the Etruscans in the arts of 

 smelting ores, they must have accelerated the progress 

 of development, which inroads of new hordes, the ten- 

 dency to intestine factions and open war, too often, 

 and* in the end, too fatally arrested. 



This imprudent irritability of temperament caused 

 the Celtic races, notwithstanding their military prowess, 

 to be ever subdued and ruled by strangers, both in 

 Asia and Eastern Europe, in Gaul and Britain. With- 

 out reference to the universally known facts in history, 

 we may add one or two more not so commonly noticed. 

 It was the Veneto-British fleet, defeated by Caesar's 

 navy, off the mouth of the Seine, which produced the 

 Roman invasion.* The struggles between the Chris- 

 tian municipal towns of foreign colonists left by the 



* It was more likely a fleet of Gallic and British Veneti 

 united, who fought D. Brutus in Quiberon Bay, in order 

 to recover Vannes, Blavet, and Hennebon, all Henyd, or 

 Venetic towns. 



