are little toad, the Natterjack, should be found in one
corner of Kerry to all appearances indigenously? All these questions,
however, belong to quite another sort of book, and to a much larger
survey of the field than there is time here to embark upon, so there is
nothing for it but to turn one's back resolutely upon the tempting sin
of discursiveness, or we shall find ourselves belated before our real
journey is even begun.

The first people, then, of whose existence in Ireland we can be said to
know anything are commonly asserted to have been of Turanian origin, and
are known as "Formorians." As far as we can gather, they were a dark,
low-browed, stunted race, although, oddly enough, the word Formorian in
early Irish legend is always used as synonymous with the word giant.
They were, at any rate, a race of utterly savage hunters and fishermen,
ignorant of metal, of pottery, possibly even of the use of fire; using
the stone hammers or hatchets of which vast numbers remain in Ireland to
this day, and specimens of which may be seen in every museum. How long
they held possession no one can tell, although Irish philologists
believe several local Irish names to date from this almost inconceivably
remote epoch. Perhaps if we think of the Lapps of the present day, and
picture them wandering about the country, catching the hares and rabbits
in nooses, burrowing in the earth or amongst rocks, and being, not
impossibly, looked down on with scorn by the great Irish elk which still
stalked majestically over the hills; rearing ugly little altars to dim,
formless gods; trembling at every sudden gust, and seeing demon faces in
every bush and brake, it will give us a fairly good notion of what these
very earliest inhabitants of Ireland were probably like.

Next followed a Belgic colony, known as the Firbolgs, who overran the
country, and appear to have been of a somewhat higher ethnological
grade, although, like the Formorians, short, dark, and swarthy.
Doubtless the latter were not entirely exterminated to make way for the
Firbolgs, any more than the Firbolgs to make way for the Danaans,
Milesians, and other successive races; such wholesale exterminations
being, in fact, very rare, especially in a country which like Ireland
seems specially laid out by kindly nature for the protection of a weaker
race struggling in the grip of a stronger one.

After the Firbolgs, though I should be sorry to be obliged to say how
long after, fresh a