NATURE 
501 
THURSDAY, MARCH 30, 1882 
ORIGINS OF ENGLISH HISTORY 
Origins of English History. By Charles Elton. (London: 
Quaritch, 1882.) 
R ELTON’S work will at once take the place it 
deserves. It will be welcomed by the many 
students who have been long waiting for such a treatise 
on our country as it was during, the ages lying just out- 
side the broad daylight of history. The subje-t, with all 
the new resources of archzology ‘and philology which 
have been brought to bear upon it, still presents a set of 
problems full of doubt and difficulty ; but it will be seen 
that Mr, Elton’s task has been not merely to bring these 
problems into shape, but to advance them by investiga- 
tions of his own. 
In the introductory chapter, which deals with the know- 
ledge of the anci nts as to our part of the world, it is. 
satisfactory to find the author bringing down to their real 
value the popular stories of Pheenicians in Britain. What 
is really recorded of the merchant-sailors of Carthage is 
their commerce with the tin-islands, but these Kassiterides, 
CE trymnides, or Hesperides, are set down in Ptolemy’s 
map as being off North-Western Spain, and it was 
Camden and other moderns who' identified them with the 
Scilly Islands, so bringing the Phcenician galleys up into 
the British Channel. In 1874, at the Congress of Prehis- 
toric Archzology at Stockholm, Dr. Hildebrand read a 
paper on the Kassiterides, which Mr. Elton does not seem 
to have met with, but which tallies closely with his own 
argument that the ancient accounts of their situation point 
to the Spanish coast. Dr. Hildebrand supposes the so- 
called islands to be only the headlands of Galicia, where tin 
is stil mined, while Mr. Elton suggests that they were the 
little islands about Vigo Bay, an idea which would be 
strengthened by proof of old tin-workings being found there- 
Kenrick’s argument that the tin-islanders going to sea in 
boats of leather were ancient Cornishmen paddling across 
to Scilly in ‘‘ the characteristic boat of Britain’’ is fairly 
met by Mr. Elton, who points out that the Iberians had 
coracles as wellas the Britons. Thus itis to be feared that 
Cornish history must give up the picturesque scenes of 
black-cloaked Kelts crossing to St. Michael’s Mount at 
low water to barter their tin for the purple and fine linen 
-of the Phcenician merchants, and to learn from them the 
-art of scalding ‘‘ Cornish cream.” More substantial 
records of early Britain are to be had from a source long 
discredited but now restored to credit. This is the famous 
voyage of Pytheas to Thule, where he saw the midnight 
sun, and by describing this and other wonders of the 
north made himself the reputation of an arch liar, till 
now, two thousand years afterwards, his townsmen the 
merchants of Marseilles have set up a statue to him as 
the leader of the first Arctic expedition. In working out 
the details of Pytheas’s expedition, our author follows 
him up the Spanish and French coast, by the British 
Channel into the German Ocean, up to Lapland (which 
he takes to be Thule), and down the east coast of Eng- 
land, back to Bordeaux. He makes Pytheas, after 
leaving Cadiz, come to the tin-islands, but it is not plain 
whether there is some actual record of this visit, or whether 
VoL. Xxv.—No, 648 
it is merely inferred that coasting up Spain above Cape 
St. Vincent mu:t have brought him to the Kassiterides. 
The explorers passed the mouths of the Loire, and round- 
ing Brittany, landed at Axantos (still Ushant), where they 
saw the temple and its nine priestesses keeping up the 
eternal fire. Not know/ng how near he had come to the 
tin-districts of Cornwall, Pytheas sailed up Channel to 
the coast of Kent. Here he had reached the ordinary 
crossing place between Britain and Gaul, and here Mr. 
Elton places that much debated island which Timeeus. 
called Mictis, lying inwards six days’ sail from Britain, 
in which the tin is found, and to which the Britons 
navigate in their coracles; while Posidonius describes it 
as an island lying off Britain, called Ictis, to which the 
miners of Cornwall carry their tin, taking it in carts 
across the intervening space which is left dry at ebb 
tide, and there the merchants buy it and convey it across 
to Gaul, whence it is carried on pack-horses down to the 
Rhone. Mr. Elton’s suggestion is that this Mictis, or 
Ictis, was the Isle of Thanet, six days’ sail from the part 
of Britain where the tin comes from, and which, though 
now silted up almost close to the mainland, was even as 
late as the ninth century separated from it by a ferry half 
a mile wide. This is a very ingenious attempt to get 
over the difficulty in the ordinary theories, of putting St. 
Michael’s Mount six days’ sail from Britain, or of getting 
carts across to the Isle of Wight at low water. It has, 
however, its difficulties to meet, as the above extracts 
show, and Mr. Elton must be left to fight his own battle 
with the antiquaries. 
Historians’ ideas of the early inhabitants of Britain» 
have changed curiously from those of a generation er two 
ago, when it was undisputed matter of fact that the Kelts 
were the aborigines of our islands, sprung from Gover, 
son of Japhet, who colonised Gaul, and left his name to 
his descendants, the Cymry. Nowadays the Kelts have 
sunk into comparatively modern Aryan invaders, and the 
question is, How many peoples are to be traced before 
them? Inthe present state of the evidence, our author 
will hardly be found fault with for assuming three earlier 
races : first, the men of the Palzolithic or Mammoth pe- 
riod, who have not been proved to be connected with later 
inhabitants ; second, the short, dark, narrow-skulled tribes 
who may be called Silurians, whose long-shaped burial- 
mounds contain stone weapons of Neolithic type, and 
whose descendants are to be recognised by their appear- 
ance, especially in South Wales and Ireland, though they 
now speak a Keltic tongue; third, a taller broad-skulled 
people seemingly of fair hair and complexion, and pos- 
sibly allied to the modern Finns, who by their remains 
in the round barrows appear to have come hither armed 
with weapons of bronze, and encroached on and eventu_ 
ally mixed with their predecessors. Aiter all these came 
in the invading Kelts, who were perhaps in the Bronze 
age when they landed on our shores, but who certainly 
possessed and worked iron long before the Roman Con- 
quest. In Mr. Elton’s good collection of passages relat- 
ing to the Kelts, such terms as golden hair, milk-white 
necks, snowy arms, point to their being on the whole 
a fair race, which tells in favour of the idea just men- 
tioned, that the dark complexion of so many modern 
Irishmen and Welshmen comes from an older Silurian 
ancestry. This ethnological speculation is doubtful 
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