6o2 



NATURE 



[April 30, 1908 



— a French hislorian would probably say " Ligurians " 

 — across the sea to Britain, the difficulty is perhaps 

 removed. 



Perhaps the most valuable pages of the book are 

 those in which he demonstrates that the short-headed 

 race was not Celtic. He represents it as wholly 

 different in physical type from the aborigines of 

 -Mediterranean stock whom it began to invade in 

 the Neolithic age. Following the lead, if we mistake 

 not, of the ceramic studies of Mr. -'Vbercromby, he 

 treats it as coming " from the Netherlands, from 

 Denmark and its islands, perhaps also from Scan- 

 dinavia and from Gaul." He gives the following 

 description of it (p. 127) : — 



" Those immigrants have often been described as a 

 tall, stalwart, round-headed race; but the evidence of 

 sepulchral remains shows that they sprang from 

 various stocks. Those of the type which is commonly 

 regarded as specially characteristic of the Bronze age 

 were taller and much more powerfully built than the 

 aborigines : their skulls were comparativelv short and 

 round; they had massive jaws, strongly marked 

 features, enormously prominent brow ridges and re- 

 treating-foreheads; and their countenances must have 

 been stern, forbidding, and sometimes almost brutal. 

 Similar skulls, which have much in common with 

 the primitive Neanderthal tvpe, have been exhumed 

 from neolithic tombs in Denmark and the Danish 

 island of Falster. But the skeletons which have been 

 found in some of the oldest Scottish cists belonged 

 to men whose average height, although they were 

 sturdy and thick set, was barely five feet three "inches, 

 and whose skulls, shorter and rounder than the others, 

 as well as their milder features, proved that they were 

 an offshoot of the so-called .\lpine race of Central 

 Europe, of which there were numerous representatives 

 in Gaul, .'^gain there were tall men with skulls of 

 an intermediate type; while others, who combined 

 harsh features and projecting brows with narrow 

 heads, and whose stature was often great, would seem 

 to have been the offspring of intermarriage between 

 the older and the newer inhabitants. Not a single 

 skeleton of the characteristic British round-barrow 

 type is known to have been discovered on French soil : 

 the round-headed inhabitants of Gaul were as conspic- 

 uously short as those of Britain were generally tall." 



The short-headed invaders began to arrive in com- 

 paratively small numbers before the end of the 

 Neolithic age, and bands of them " landed successively 

 through long ages upon our eastern and southern 

 shores" after the Bronze age set in (p. 127); but 

 " there is no evidence that the brachycephalic people 

 who built round barrows ever reached Ireland, at least 

 in appreciable numbers " (p. 432). They seem to 

 have intermarried with the Neolithic aborigines, and 

 possibly in the course of ages they gave up their lan- 

 guage in favour of the latter's. In any case, these 

 conclusions would, to all intents and purposes, concern 

 the eastern and southern coasts alone, which are not 

 represented by any known Celtic language, living or 

 dead. So it would be idle to suggest that, in ca.se the 

 language of the short-heads became firmly established 

 here, its influence on subsequent Celtic on our southern 

 and eastern coasts might be very different from that 

 of the language of the Neolithic aborigines more to 

 tlie west, let us say, on the syntax of Irish and Welsh ; 

 for the evidence is wanting in the shape of a Celtic 

 NO. 2009, VOL. 77] 



speech embodying the results of the modifying influ- 

 ence in question. Dr. Holmes applies the term 

 aborigines to the populations of Mediterranean stock 

 that were here from the beginning of the Neolithic 

 age, and extends that stock to Ireland (pp. 64, 109, 

 398). If, as we believe, he is right in his treatment 

 and distribution of these people whom he claims to call 

 the aborigines, it would be natural to suppose them to 

 have left their name to the islands of our archipelago. 

 We allude to the name underlying that of npframtai 

 N^troi or Pictish Islands. Dr. Holmes will have none 

 of this : he declines to admit that " the Picts repre- 

 sented that race in a special sense " (p. 409). For 

 him " the Picts were a mixed people, comprising 

 descendants of the Neolithic aborigines, of the Round 

 Barrow race, and of the Celtic invaders " (p. 417). 

 This conclusion leaves us not a little puzzled, not only 

 as to how he distinguishes between his last-mentioned 

 Celtic invaders and the main body of Celtic settlers, 

 but as to how he proposes to settle tlie question of 

 the distribution of his mixed people in the British 

 Isles. 



He has exposed with relentless industry all kinds of 

 inconsistencies and mistakes in the theories to which 

 he is opposed, and thereby has rendered great service 

 to the history of ancient Britain. For all that, 

 he is not at his best when teaching their busi- 

 ness to the mistaken individuals who set out to studv 

 Celtic philology. His usual method is to pit the 

 views of one against those of another, and in the case 

 of views which he cannot accept himself he makes 

 use of all the resources of his critical skill : not in- 

 variably so, however, with views which fall in with 

 his own. Thus he virtually denies that ancient Irish 

 had the sound of />, and states (p. 411) that M. 

 d'.Vrbois de Jubainville " reminds his opponents, that 

 ^ is absent from all Ogam inscriptions." This would 

 not be true, as it occurs not less than a score of times 

 in Ogam, and — a fact which excludes doubt as to the 

 sound meant — two of the names which have it happen 

 to be the Latin Pompeius and Turpillius. This state- 

 ment surprised us not a little, as the learned French- 

 man has not been known to devote much attention to 

 Ogam inscriptions. On perusing the review in which 

 he is represented as making his sweeping assertion, we 

 discover that it is conspicuous by its absence. What 

 he did say was that ^ is not found in the Ogam 

 alphabet, which is by no means the same thing ; the 

 distance of time between the oldest Ogam alphabet 

 (dating from the beginning of the twelfth century) 

 and the oldest Ogam inscription containing- a symbol 

 for p may be put down as ranging from five to seven 

 centuries. Dr. Holmes could if he liked have been 

 more accurate, and at the same time leave M. d'.-Vrbois 

 de Jubainville 's opponents with plenty of difficulties to 

 engage their attention. 



To take another instance, the author uses the 

 following words (p. 421) • — 



" .According to Bede, the place which marked the 

 western termination of the wall of Severus was called 

 in Pictish Pcnnfahcl. Pean is commonly identified 

 with the Welsh word pcnii, 'a head '; and accordingly 

 it has been inferred that Pictish was ' a Kvmric or 



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