ved
implements, taken by themselves, merely denote either a progress in the
useful arts, or, what is more likely, some new commercial relations. The
same improved implements, if considered as means to an end, denote an
improvement in the nutrition of the individuals who used them. The bones
of a man who hunts stags and oxen with bronze weapons will carry more
flesh, and consequently be more fuller developed than those of a man
who, for want of better instruments than flint and bone arrow-heads,
feeds chiefly upon whale blubber and shell-fish. Now, what applies to
the bones in general, applies--though perhaps in a less degree--to the
skull. In the difference, then, between the crania of the Stone and
Bronze periods I see no introduction of a new variety of our species,
but merely the effects of a better diet, arising from an improvement in
the instruments for obtaining it. If the assumption, then, of a
_pre_-Keltic stock be gratuitous, the question as to the date of our
population is considerably narrowed. Its introduction (as already
indicated) must have been sufficiently late to allow the original
affinities between the Keltic dialects of the British Isles, and the
Keltic dialects of the European Continent, to remain visible. But as
many millenniums would be required for the opposite effect of
obliterating the original similarity, this is saying but little. All
that it is safe to assert is--

1. That the primitive Britons occupied the islands sufficiently _early_
to allow of the relative levels of the land and sea on the valley of the
Forth to alter to the amount of twenty-five feet--there or thereabouts.

2. That they occupied it sufficiently _late_ to allow the common origin
of the Gaelic and British tongues to remain visible in the nineteenth
century.

This latter position rests upon the supposition that the early
inhabitants in question were of the same stock as the present Welsh and
Gaels--the contrary doctrine being held to be, not erroneous, but
gratuitous and unnecessary.

We are now prepared to find that in certain monuments, less ancient than
those of the Stone period, the enclosed relics are of metal, and that
this metal is an alloy of copper and tin--_bronze_--not _brass_, which
is an alloy of copper and zinc. Not only are such relics more elaborate
in respect to their workmanship, but the kinds of them are more varied.
They are referable indeed to the three classes of warlike instruments,
industrial i