220 NATURE STUDIES. 



From their original Central Asian home, these 

 warlike Aryans began to disperse themselves as 

 fighting colonists on every side, probably some five 

 or six thousand years since. One great branch, now 

 speaking the Celtic variety of the common language, 

 moved westward across the face of Central Europe ; 

 and its members spread themselves, long before the 

 beginning of written history, over all the western 

 coasts of the continent as a conquering and superior 

 race. Though at first they were only armed, like the 

 Euskarians amongst whom they came, with stone 

 hatchets and flint-tipped arrows, yet, as they were 

 tall, big-limbed, powerful men, while the Euskarians 

 were comparatively short, squat, defenceless folk, they 

 seem easily to have overrun almost the whole of what 

 is now France, Spain, and the Low Countries, and 

 to have established themselves, at least as a rough 

 aristocracy of chieftains, among the conquered and 

 servile Euskarian population. But in some places the 

 Euskarians, and their kinsfolk the Ligurians and 

 Aquitanians, appear to have maintained their inde- 

 pendence; while in others, though the Celts were 

 masters, the dark-skinned aboriginal people yet sur- 

 vived in vast numbers. It was only in the most 

 thoroughly conquered parts of the continent that the 

 pure-blooded Celts themselves formed the principal 

 mass of the population. The independent dark tribes 

 of the extreme west retained their native language, 

 which lives on to our own time as the Basque tongue ; 

 but the vanquished and enslaved Euskarians of the 



