here is another fact that should be noticed. The languages of Great
Britain are reducible to two divisions, both of which agree in many
essential points with certain languages or dialects of Continental
Europe. The British was closely, the Gaelic more distantly, allied to
the ancient tongue of the Gauls. From this affinity we get an argument
_against_ any extreme antiquity of the Britons of the British Isles. The
date of their separation from the tribes of the Continent was not so
remote as to obliterate and annihilate all traces of the original
mother-tongue. It was not long enough for the usual processes by which
languages are changed, to eject from even the Irish Gaelic (the most
unlike of the two) every word and inflection which the progenitors of
the present Irish brought from Gaul, and to replace them by others. So
that, at the first view, we have a limit in this direction; yet unless
we have settled certain preliminaries, the limit is unreal. All that it
gives us is the comparatively recent introduction of the _Keltic_ stock.
Varieties of the human species, _other than Keltic_, may have existed
at an indefinitely early period, and subsequently have been superseded
by the Kelts. Philology, then, tells us little more than history; and it
may not be superfluous to add, that the occupancy of Great Britain by a
stock of the kind in question, earlier than the Keltic, and different
from it, is no imaginary case of the author's, but a doctrine which has
taken the definite form of a recognized hypothesis, and characterizes
one of the best ethnological schools of the Continent--the Scandinavian.

For the ambitious attempt at a reconstruction of the earliest state of
the human kind in Britain, we may prepare ourselves by a double series
of processes. Having taken society as it exists at the present moment,
we eject those elements of civilization which have brought it to its
present condition, beginning with the latest first. We then take up a
smaller question, and consider what arts and what forms of
knowledge--what conditions of society--existing amongst the earlier
populations have been lost or superseded with ourselves. The result is
an approximation to the state of things in the infancy of our species.
We subtract (for instance) from the sum of our present means and
appliances such elements as the knowledge of the power of steam, the art
of printing, and gunpowder; all which we can do under the full light of
history. Str