222 NATVEE STUDIES. 



parts of the Scotch Highlands, the dark people 

 remained wholly independent, as the inhabitants of 

 those regions long afterwards did at the time of the 

 English settlement. The South Welsh tribe of 

 Euskarians were known as Silures, and they preserved 

 their nationality intact down to the period of the 

 Eoman Conquest. 



Now, what sort of people were the pure-blooded 

 Celts who first came to Britain ? No doubt ifc may be 

 a shock to many readers to be told so, but they were 

 undoubtedly a light-skinned, fair-haired, blue-eyed, 

 and round-headed race in fact, typical Aryans of the 

 same sort as the modern Germans, and possessed of 

 exactly those peculiarities which we ordinarily speak 

 of as Anglo-Saxon. About this there can be no 

 manner of mistake. Their barrows, known both by 

 their shape and by their bronze implements, contain 

 round skulls, quite different from the long skulls of 

 the Euskarians ; and the universal testimony of the 

 Roman writers, whose knowledge of the Celts was 

 obtained while they still lived in comparative purity 

 in Gaul and south-eastern Britain, makes it quite 

 certain that they had light hair, white skin, and blue 

 eyes. How, then, comes it that most of us think of 

 the Celtic type as essentially dark and black-haired ? 

 The reason is simply this. When the Celts conquered 

 Britain, they left large numbers of Euskarians alive, 

 in the northern and western part of the island, at 

 least ; and it is the mixed Celtic and Euskarian 

 descendants of these people who now form the 



