eagre fragments.
Important gaps have fortunately been filled, owing to modern Science and
to her manifold researches. She has inherited the wand of the departed
wizards, and has touched with her talisman the gate of sepulchres; the
tombs have opened and the dead have spoken. What countries did thy
war-ship visit? she inquired of the Scandinavian viking. And in answer
the dead man, asleep for centuries among the rocks of the Isle of Skye,
showed golden coins of the caliphs in his skeleton hand. These coins are
not a figure of speech; they are real, and may be seen at the Edinburgh
Museum. The wand has touched old undeciphered manuscripts, and broken
the charm that kept them dumb. From them rose songs, music,
love-ditties, and war-cries: phrases so full of life that the living
hearts of to-day have been stirred by them; words with so much colour in
them that the landscape familiar to the eyes of the Celts and Germans
has reappeared before us.

Much remains undiscovered, and the dead hold secrets they may yet
reveal. In the unexplored tombs of the Nile valley will be found one
day, among the papyri stripped from Ptolemaic mummies, the account of a
journey made to the British Isles about 330 B.C., by a Greek of
Marseilles named Pytheas, a contemporary of Aristotle and Alexander the
Great, of which a few sentences only have been preserved.[1] But even
now the darkness which enveloped the origin has been partly cleared
away.

To the primitive population, the least known of all, that reared the
stones of Carnac in France, and in England the gigantic circles of
Stonehenge and Avebury, succeeded in both countries, many centuries
before Christ, the Celtic race.

The Celts ([Greek: keltai]) were thus called by the Greeks from the name
of one of their principal tribes, in the same way as the French,
English, Scottish, and German nations derive theirs from that of one of
their principal tribes. They occupied, in the third century before our
era, the greater part of Central Europe, of the France of to-day, of
Spain, and of the British Isles. They were neighbours of the Greeks and
Latins; the centre of their possessions was in Bavaria. From there, and
not from Gaul, set out the expeditions by which Rome was taken, Delphi
plundered, and a Phrygian province rebaptized Galatia. Celtic cemeteries
abound throughout that region; the most remarkable of them was
discovered, not in France, but at Hallstadt, near Salzburg, in
Austria.[2]