OUR ANCESTORS. 233 



originally Danes like those who colonised eastern 

 England ; but they had intermarried with the native 

 women of Neustria (northern France), where they 

 settled ; and the Neustrians were, of course, Celtic 

 Gauls, largely intermixed with Euskarian elements. 

 Moreover, the Conquest brought over, not these half- 

 breed Normans alone, but many pure Celt-Euskarian 

 Gauls or Frenchmen from the neighbouring provinces 

 as well, together with a considerable sprinkling of 

 pure Celt-Euskarian Bretons from Brittany a very 

 dark stock, like the Black Celts of Ireland and 

 Scotland. Accordingly, so far as numerical prepon- 

 derance of the dark and light race goes, the Norman 

 Conquest left things in Britain pretty much where they 

 were before. 



Thus, then, to sum up the general result of this 

 brief inquiry, we may say that the ethnical composition 

 of modern Britain is somewhat after the following 

 fashion. First, there is a substratum or oldest stage 

 of dark, non- Aryan people, whom we call Euskarians 

 for convenience, and who are the descendants of the 

 very earliest aboriginal inhabitants in recent times, 

 the neolithic folk. These Euskarians are now nowhere 

 to be found in very great purity, for they have married 

 in with the later Aryan invaders till both are at present 

 well-nigh indistinguishable. But they are still found 

 in a fairly unmixed form among the Black Celts of 

 Ireland and Scotland, where one or two little com- 

 munities yet remain almost unaltered in the wilds of 

 Connaught or the highlands of the central Scotch 



