1865.] Kett on Prehistoric History. 245 



armies to conquer Italy, Greece, and even Asia Minor; that the 

 Teutonic, both Low and High German, traversed some portion of the 

 road in common with the Scandinavian ; that they then parted to meet 

 at a future period, and to make this island their battle-field. Com- 

 parative Philology, one of the newest of the sciences, has told us much 

 of an older age. Archaeology, a very old study, has only of late revealed 

 much that is new to us about a later period, perhaps some new science 

 yet to be discovered, or at all events perfected, will tell us more of 

 this transition state. 



We must now leave for a time the Aryans as we have found them 

 amidst the diversified country of West Central Asia. The successive 

 migrations of nations have already more than once been compared to 

 oceanic waves. Such a wave seems traceable previous to the dispersion 

 of the Northern Aryans. Here and there on the coasts of Europe on 

 narrow spits of land, defended by mountain ranges or by almost 

 impenetrable cold, are to be found remnants of a race, once, it may be 

 believed, numerous, now almost extinct. The Basques in Spain, and 

 the Lapps* in Scandinavia, are supposed to be the last survivors of a 

 family of nations that spread not only over those peninsulas, but over 

 Denmark and these Islands, if not over almost the whole of Western 

 Europe. Whether even they were the earliest human inhabitants of 

 Great Britain is still a moot question. 



The Stone Age is the earliest of which we have any remains, either 

 in these islands or in Scandinavia. If any of the people of this 

 period belonged to the Aryan family, during their wanderings from 

 Central Asia our predecessors had lost most of the arts acquired 

 during a settlement for some time in a country possessing a diversified 

 surface and various capabilities. The period of which we are now 

 speaking has been identified with that of the pine forests of Denmark, 

 amid which the Scotch fir, now no longer known in that country, 

 raised its massive head. No such peculiarity is known to have existed 

 in the Flora of Great Britain, but many a wild beast, now unknown to 

 us, some even extinct or verging on extinction, roamed through the 

 forests as yet untouched by the axe of the woodman, sank into quag- 

 mires that never quivered beneath the footstep of man fearful of 

 nature's wonders, or made its home in the cave that served for a dwell- 

 ing-place, or the model of a dwelling-place to the biped, whose nature 

 was but little raised above his quadruped competitors in the struggle 

 for life. Traces of many of these extinct animals existed down to 

 quite modern times. Many an animal has died out within historic 

 times, and many more in the long ages that preceded this. Such a 

 change as the introduction of man must have had an immense effect 

 upon the brute creation. 



As late as in the time of David the First of Scotland, beaver skins 



* I know not whether the Esquimaux are supposed to be ethnically con- 

 nected with the Lapps and Finns, but many of the peculiarities of the earliest of 

 our predecessors have been compared to the present habits of these remarkable 

 tribes, and one of the motives put forward as a reason for research in Arctic regions 

 is that the habits of the people to be discovered there would probably throw much 

 light on the condition and mode of life of our own remote ancestors. 



