Xlvi LIFE OF DR. ROLLESTON. 



are found, as if the new broad-skulled people had not exter- 

 minated but mingled with their narrow-skulled predecessors. 

 By what national names these races ought to be called is a 

 question only answerable as yet in the vaguest way, and indeed 

 not likely ever to be fully answered. But it will always have 

 an attraction for historians and anthropologists, who will find it 

 treated largely and soberly by Rolleston. The early skull-type 

 of the long barrows he connects with the black-haired type still 

 prevalent in the West of England, shorter in stature, feebler in 

 development, and with a narrower skull than the men of the 

 fair tint of skin and hair. To the old narrow-headed population 

 he inclines to give the name Silurian, after the well-known 

 passage of Tacitus (Agr. n) about the natives of Britain. He 

 protests against the name Iberian, now often used with the 

 implication that an early population of Britain came across from 

 Spain. Such a name should not, he considered, be given without 

 definite reasons, and he points his protest by a quotation from 

 Professor Rhys that the tradition of an old connexion between 

 Ireland and Spain may be nothing but an etymological myth 

 founded on the similarity of the names Iberus and Hibernus. To 

 the broad-skulled type of men who come in with the round 

 burial-mounds he gives the name Cimbric, from likeness of 

 skull between these bronze-using Britons and the Danes whose 

 country was once known as the Cimbric peninsula. Among the 

 less technical parts of the volume are studies of the civilisation 

 of the ancient races of Britain. While the earliest known of 

 these, the men of the palaeolithic period contemporaries of the 

 mammoths, lived in England when its hills and plains had not 

 yet their present contour, the later neolithic men whose remains 

 are found in the long barrows belong to a time when the outline 

 of the country had come much into its present shape, for their 

 forts and burial-mounds stand on high places of view and 

 vantage which show that their land already had its escarpments 

 and river-courses much as at this day. These stone-age tribes 

 of Britain were inferior to the stone-age lake-dwellers of 

 Switzerland, whose communication with the Mediterranean 



