6 1 8 Summary. 



Cornwall, and in Wales where some of the great Coal- 

 measure, metalliferous, and slaty regions lie there are 

 busy centres of population, where the operations are 

 often directed by, and the manual labour connected 

 with the mineral products is well done by the original 

 Celtic inhabitants. 



It is interesting to go back a little and inquire what 

 may have been the condition of our country when man 

 first set foot upon its surface. We know that these 

 islands of ours have been frequently united to the Con- 

 tinent, and as frequently disunited, partly by elevations 

 and depressions of the land, and to a great extent, also, 

 by denudations. When the earliest human population 

 of which we have any traces came, Britain was doubtless 

 united to the Continent. Such is the deliberate opinion 

 of some of our best geologists, and also that these pre- 

 historic men inhabited our country along with the great 

 hairy Mammoth, the Ehinoceros, the Cave Bear, the 

 Lion, the Hippopotamus, and many modern animals 

 and perhaps, in pre-Glacial times, they travelled westward 

 into what is now Britain from the Continent, along with 

 these extinct mammalia. The country was then most 

 probably covered by great forests, swamps, and peaty 

 flats, unless it may have been that the Chalk downs 

 and the higher mountain-tops were bare. 



But in times much later, denudations and alterations 

 of level having taken place, our island again became 

 disunited from the mainland : and now, with all its 

 numerous firths and inlets, its great extent of coast, its 

 admirable harbours, our country lies within the direct 

 influence of that Grulf Stream which softens the whole 

 climate of the West of Europe, and we, a people of 

 mixed race, Celt, Scandinavian, Angles, and Norman, 

 more or less intermingled in blood, are so happily 



