362 
PRE-H IS TOE I C DWELLINGS. 
BY GEORGE E. ROBERTS, F.A.S.L. 
U NIVERSAL Histories, in twenty or more folio volumes, 
which adorned the libraries of the last century, taught 
that the first habitation of man was a hut, an erection of 
wood somewhat resembling a Canadian log-cabin. The variety 
of this dwelling represented in the pictorial editions of these 
chronicles as the domicile of our first parents is the neatest 
of rose-entwined cottages ; while in a picture of ancient 
British domestic life, exhibited by another of these encyclo- 
paedias of history, the family sit at the door of a house which, 
save that the windows are unglazed, more nearly resembles a 
cottage ornee in St. John's Wood than any home of a modern 
English peasant. But recent discoveries have dispelled these 
roseate views of the past. The earliest inhabitants of these 
isles of whom we have yet any evidences appear to have 
approached as nearly as any existing savage tribes to that 
perfectly primitive state of mankind for which ethnologists 
have as yet sought in vain. The domestic relics left by 
Celtic tribes in Britain are rude enough to dissipate the 
pleasing* imaginings of the olden antiquaries; and as the 
existence of two pre- Celtic peoples has now been ascertained, 
it is scarcely matter of wonder that the remains of their 
dwelling- spots exhibit the simplest form of habitation con- 
ceivable. It would be beyond the limits of this article to 
trace the progress of these two pre- Celtic — Allophyllian as 
Dr. Wilson styles them — waves of the human race, or to show 
by the numerous examples afforded from their traces in Italy, 
Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, France, and the British 
Isles, that although, in a certain broad sense, their ages 
coincide with the three periods into which archaeologists have 
portioned out pre-historic time — viz., the stone age, bronze age, 
and iron age — no sharp line of sunderance marks them, for 
one age not only graduates into another, but in many in* 
stances two sets of evidences are co-existent. I propose, 
therefore, to confine my remarks to an examination of the 
dwellings of these two pre- Celtic peoples according to the 
evidences which archaeologists have obtained from a careful 
examination of their remains. The Cyclopean erections attri- 
buted to the first of these early races, cromlechs, megalithic 
