INHABITANTS. 29 



animals. The famous Wookey Hole, near Wells, yielded the bones of various 

 carnivorous animals, including the hyena, the wolf, and the bear, as well as 

 those of the mammoth, rhinoceros, reindeer, Bos primigenius, gigantic Irish deer, 

 and horse, together with rudely shaped implements made of flint and burnt bones. 

 Similar remains have been unearthed in other caves and in older valley gravels, 

 the implements in these instances being of rude workmanship, such as are 

 usually assigned to the palaeolithic or old stone age. Far more frequent, how- 

 ever, has been the discovery of polished celts and other articles indicating a 

 higher stage of civilisation. These relics of the neolithic age occur everywhere 

 throuo-hout the British Isles, from Caithness to Cornwall, and from the east 

 coast of England to the west coast of Ireland. Even in the bleak Orkney and 

 Shetland Islands, and all over the Inner and Outer Hebrides, they have been 

 met with.* Neolithic man was associated with a mammalian fauna very dififerent 

 from that of the palaeolithic age, its most characteristic members being dogs, horses, 

 pigs, several breeds of oxen, the bison, the red deer, and the great Irish deer. 



Still further and fuller evidence of the presence of prehistoric man is furnished 

 by sepulchral barrows, cairns, and cromlechs, and by the remains of human 

 habitations. The most interesting amongst these latter are the crannoges, so 

 abundant in Ireland and Scotland. The first of these lake dwellings was dis- 

 covered in 1839, in the small Lake of Lagore, near Dunshaughlin, in the count}'^ 

 of Meath. Besides the bones of domestic animals, it yielded weapons and other 

 articles made of stone, bone, wood, bronze, iron, and silver, thus proving that it must 

 have been inhabited from the most remote to a comparatively recent period ; and 

 in reality some of these Irish lake dwellings served as places of refuge down 

 to the middle of the seventeenth century. These crannogos are not constructed 

 on piles over the water, like the lake dwellings of Switzerland, but are placed 

 upon islands, in many instances artificial, and enclosed by a stockade of timber. 

 A narrow causeway generally connected them with the land, and boats cut out 

 of a single piece of oak have been found near them. The harrous, or artificial 

 mounds of earth erected for sepulchral purposes, as well as the cairns, or heaps 

 of stone piled up with the same objects, or as memorials, have furnished even 

 more interesting information on the ancient inhabitants of the country. Many 

 of them date back to prehistoric times, but others have been constructed since 

 the occupation of the country by Romans and Saxons. The oldest barrows are 

 of a longish shape ; the skulls found in them are, with scarcely an exception, 

 dolichocephalic ; and most of the implements are of polished stone, or neolithic. 

 Neither bronze nor iron weapons have been discovered in them. According to 

 Huxley, people b}^ whom these barrows, as well as most of the chambered gallery 

 graves, were erected, were kinsmen of the Iberians and Aquitani.t They were 

 a dark people, and the Silures, who inhabited South-western England and the Cas- 

 siterides, or Tin Islands, belonged to them. They are described by Greek writers 

 as having curly hair and dark complexions, and as comparatively civilised in their 



* James Geikie, "The Great Ice Age." 

 t " Critiques and Addresses," 1873. 



