1* REPORT — 18G5. 



Southern France*, and bears and hyenas were denizens of the South of 

 England f. More than this, remains of the rudest human art ever seen are 

 certainly found buried with and are thought to belong to races who lived 

 contemporaneously with the mammoth and rhinoceros, and experienced the 

 cold of a Gallic or British winter, from which the woolly covering of the 

 wild animals was a fitting protection. 



Our own annals begin with the Kelts, if indeed we are entitled to call by 

 that historic name the really separate nations, Belgian, Iberian, and Teu- 

 tonic, whom the Roman writers recognize as settlers in Britain J ; settlers 

 among a really earlier family, our rudest and oldest forefathers, who may 

 have been, as they thought themselves to be, the primitive people of the 

 land§. But beyond the KeXrai who occupied the sources of the Danube 

 and the slopes of the Pyrenees, and were known to Borne in later days, there 

 was present to the mind of the father of Grecian history a still more western 

 race, the Cynetae, who may perhaps be supposed the very earliest people of 

 the extreme west of the continent of Europe. Were those the people, the 

 first poor pilgrims from the East, whose footsteps we are slowly tracing in 

 the vaUeys of Picardy and the south of England, if not on the borders of the 

 lakes of Switzerland ? Are their kindred still to be found among the Rhaetic 

 Alps and the Asturian cliffs, if not amid the wilds of Connemara, pressed 

 into those mountainous recesses by the legions of Borne, the spear of the 

 Visigoth, and the sword of the Saxon ? Or must we regard them as races of 

 an earlier type, who had ceased to chip flints before the arrival of Saxon, or 

 Goth, or Kelt, or Cynetian ? These questions of romantic interest in the 

 study of the distribution and languages of the families of man are part of a 

 large circle of inquiry which finds sympathy in several of our Sections, 

 especially those devoted to Zoology, Physiology, and Ethnology. Let us not 

 expect or desire for them a very quick, or, at present, a very definite settle- 

 ment. Deep shadows have gathered over all the earlier ages of mankind, 

 which perhaps still longer periods of time may not avail to remove. Yet let 

 U3 not undervalue the progress of ethnological inquiry, nor fail to mark how, 

 within the period to which our recollections cling, the revelations of early 

 Egypt have been followed by a Chronology of the ancient kingdoms on the 

 Tigris and Euphrates, through the same rigorous study of language. Thus 

 has our Rawlinson added another page to the briUiant discoveries of Young 

 and Champollion, Lepsius and Bosellini. 



Nor, though obtained in a different way, must we forget the new know- 

 ledge of a people nearer home, which the philosophic mind of Keller has 

 opened to us among his native mountains. There, on the borders of the 

 Alpine lakes, before the great Roman general crossed the Bhone, lived a 

 people older than the Helvetians ; whose rude lives, passed in hunting and 

 fishing, were nevertheless marked by some of the many inventions which 

 everywhere, even in the most unfavourable situations, accompany the least 

 civihzed of mankind. Implements of stone and pottery of the rudest sort 

 belong to the earliest of these people ; while ornamented iron weapons of war, 

 and innumerable other fabrics in that metal, appear about the later habita- 



* See the Memoirs of M. Lartet on the Caves of the Dordogne, 1863-64. 



t In the caves of Gower, Devon, and Somerset, flint flakes occur with several extinct 

 animals. 



J Gallic or Belgian on the south-east coast ; Iberian in South Wales ; German at the 

 foot of the Grampians. (Tacitus, Vita Agricola?.) 



§ " Britannic® pars interior ab iis incolitur, quos natos in insula ipsa memoria pro- 

 dituvn dicunt." (Caesar, v. 12.) 



