248 PRINCIPAL SIR WILLIAM TURNER ON 



knife and a flint nodule doubtless used as a means of obtaining light, contained a 

 clay pipe, a rusted iron spoon, and a pannikin. 



Caesar described a Celtic tribe, the Belgae, who opposed his landing in Britain in 

 55-54 B.C., and there can be no doubt that the Celts had occupied large tracts of the 

 island during several previous centuries. It is difficult to state the exact date of 

 invasion — possibly about 400 B.C. ; and scholars differ in opinion as to whether it 

 took place before or after the linguistic division into the Goidelic (Gaelic) and the 

 Brythonic (Welsh) dialectic groups. Great uncertainty has also prevailed in regard 

 to the part of the Continent occupied by the invaders before their migration west- 

 wards, due in part doubtless to the indefinite use by authors of the term Celts. 

 Bkoca and other French ethnologists had restricted the name to the brachy cephalic 

 people who occupied Central Gaul ; others had given it a wider signification, embrac- 

 ing a larger area of Europe in which the head form was not of uniform type. Rice 

 Holmes* in reviewing the opinions of different writers favours the view that the 

 Celtic invaders of Britain were not a pure brachycephalic people, but contained pre- 

 ponderating dolicho- and mesocephalic elements, as a result of intermixture and 

 intermarriage with longer-headed races before their migration. It is difficult there- 

 fore to express by a single term the characteristic form of the Celtic skull. Anders 

 Retzius distinguished two varieties : the one long and narrow, the other broader, 

 not so compressed laterally. Sven Nilsson pronounced it to be vague and uncertain. 

 Owing to the practice of cremation, authentic specimens are few in number, and 

 skulls catalogued in museums as Celtic have often been imperfectly named, their 

 race and place of origin being uncertain. The conclusion that the Celts are a mixed 

 people, whose crania may exhibit brachy-, meso-, or dolichocephalic proportions, 

 seems therefore to be not without justification. 



Associated with the Celtic question are the terms Picts and Scots, employed by- 

 historians in describing the Roman occupation of Britain and the period immediately 

 following its evacuation by them. The term Picts was applied to inhabitants of 

 Scotland living to the north of the Forth and the Clyde, and perhaps may have 

 included the people between these estuaries and the Wall of Hadrian and the 

 Solvvay. Craniology can throw no light on their racial features, as no specimens 

 have been preserved which can be definitely regarded as Pictish. The Pictish 

 question is essentially a linguistic one, and its solution mostly hinges upon the 

 interpretation of the few words believed to be Pictish which have been preserved. 

 Scotland had been from remote times occupied in succession by neolithic and 

 bronze-age people, afterwards by Celts, and representatives of all these races had 

 without doubt survived into the Roman period. In ignorance of the race dis- 

 tinctions with which we are now acquainted, the Romans may have regarded their 

 Pictish opponents as one people, antagonistic to them in their sentiments and 

 actions. I attach therefore weight to the arguments advanced by Mr Rice Holmes 



* Ancient Britain, Oxford, 1907. 



