OUR ANCESTORS. 2 2$ 



so-called Celts of the Highlands, Lancashire, North 

 Wales, and Cornwall. Moreover, it is certain that 

 the Euskarians of the conquered districts soon learned 

 to speak Celtic alone, just as the Irish are now fast 

 learning to speak English alone ; and so after a short; 

 time they became as indistinguishable from the true 

 Celts, as Normans and Danes in England have become 

 indistinguishable from the rest of the community. 

 Even the Silures, who maintained their position as an 

 independent Euskarian tribe in South Wales, seem to 

 have acquired the use of the Celtic Welsh tongue 

 before the date of the Roman invasion. When con- 

 trasted with the Teutonic English, all these Celtic- 

 speaking peoples came naturally at a later period to 

 be regarded as Celts. 



Thus, at the date when Britain first became known 

 to the civilised southern world by the Mediterranean, 

 and before any Englishmen had yet settled in the 

 land, its ethnical arrangement was something of this 

 sort : Along the southern and eastern plains, from 

 Hampshire, by Sussex and Kent to East Anglia, 

 Lincolnshire, and the vale of Yorkshire, there lived a 

 light Aryan Celtic race, with more or less of subject 

 or enslaved Euskarians doubtless, a good deal inter- 

 mixed, as negroes, mulattoes, quadroons, and whites, 

 still are in the Southern States and the West Indies, 

 though the light Celtic aristocracy probably kept up 

 the purity of its own blood in the female line, as also 

 happens in the analogous modern case. Further west 

 and further north, among the hills of the Devonian 



