The President's Address. 



13 



Northern Asia, where their representative round-headed people still 

 exist, retaining* all their pristine idiosyncracies. These were the 

 people whom Csesar speaks of as the Belgae, and whom he describes 

 as a recent importation into Britain from the Continent. The short 

 long-headed people were the Iberians, a race about whose origin less 

 can be said with certainty. "Whilst some have been so bold as to 

 endeavour to trace them across the Atlantic, Professor Huxley- 

 brings them by way of Egypt from the Melanesian people of 

 Australia and the Asiatic Isles. It seems likely, both from their 

 stature and head-form, as well as from the scanty evidence of their 

 colour in ancient histories, that they must have had affinity for 

 some or other of the dark races of mankind which now occupy the 

 Southern hemisphere. This much, at any rate, may be said without 

 drawing too largely on our imaginative faculties, that the round 

 head and light complexion is a northern, whilst the long head and 

 dark skin is a southern peculiarity of the races which occupy the 

 world at the present time, and that the two classes of skeletons 

 found in the barrows may be those of branches of those two great 

 primitive races which met and contended for the mastery in the 

 British Isles at the time we are speaking of. Thus far the evidence 

 derived from archaeological sources is in complete harmony with 

 tradition and with ethnology, but as we approach non-historic times, 

 and attempt to deal with the unrecorded life of the Britons who 

 were contemporaneous with our earliest histories, we find ourselves 

 involved in some obscurity. The extension of the Roman Empire 

 to Britain checked for more than three centuries the westerly 

 drifting of nomades into Britain, and turned the current of migra- 

 tion northward into Scotland and round to Ireland, so that at the 

 end of that time the Britons found their Scandinavian enemies 

 upon them from the north as well as from the east. One of the 

 last acts of the Roman Emperors was to post a force on the east 

 coast of England, which was called the Saxon shore, to repel these 

 invaders, but no sooner was that force withdrawn than the full tide 

 of westerly migration set in again direct upon Southern Britain 

 with results that are well known to us all. During the comparative 

 blank in history that follows that period we almost lose sight of the 



