230 GENERAL REMARKS 



bronze period again, though its term of duration in these islands 

 was no doubt almost infinitely shorter than that of the stone and 

 bone age, or rather ages, was yet long enough, as the antiquary 

 may assure the philologist, to admit of quite as great a differentia- 

 tion in any single language as that which exists between Gaelic 

 and Cymric at present, or to allow of the importation of more than 

 one already differentiated dialect in more than one not recorded 

 invasion. But if the bronze age may have been of very long 

 duration, and if the stone and bone age as represented to us in 

 the long barrows may have been of very much longer, the anti- 

 quary who may have explored one of these latter tumuli on a hill, 

 the sides and bottom of which may contain in their gravels the 

 implements, if not the bones, of still earlier races, knows and feels 

 that in dealing even with human phylogeny, he has to keep con- 

 stantly in mind in all his speculations that the permutations and 

 combinations of races possible in such lengths of time are conceiv- 

 ably and even practically infinite. The consideration of distance in 

 space, when we are dealing with a question of geographical distribu- 

 tion, is inseparably connected with the consideration of length of 

 time, and the great interval of space which separates Spain from 

 Great Britain should make us careful as to borrowing a name from 

 the tribes of one of those countries, and imposing it upon a tribe in 

 another, without the most definite historical or archaeological reasons. 

 Without going into the arguments which the Rev. Wentworth 

 Webster has (see ' Journal Anth. Inst. London/ v. p. 5, July, 1875) 

 brought forward against the view which w T ould identify the Basques 

 with the earlier dark-haired dolichocephali of Great Britain, it may 

 be well to state the history of the opinion which connects certain 

 Welsh and Irish inhabitants of Wales and Ireland with the Iberian 

 inhabitants of Spain. This, so far as I have been able to make it 

 out, is as follows. Tacitus, in the eleventh chapter of his Agricola, 

 says with reference to the Silures that their ' colorati vultus ' and 

 'torti crines,' 'et posita contra Hispania, Hiberos veteres traje- 

 cisse easque sedes habitasse fidem faciunt.' The boldness of this 

 suggestion contrasts strongly with the caution of the opening 

 sentence of the same chapter ' Ceterum Britanniarum qui mortales 

 initio coluerint indigenae an advecti, ut inter barbaros, parum com- 

 pertum ;' nevertheless, Jornandes, as quoted p. 226, and Irish and 

 Spanish histories and traditions are constantly (see, e. g., Professor 



