he most careless traveller could pass them by
without seeing that they do not stand there without a purpose. They speak
for themselves, and they certainly speak in a language that is neither
Roman, Saxon, Danish, nor Norman. Hence in England they may, by a kind of
exhaustive process of reasoning, be claimed as relics of Celtic
civilization. The same argument applies to the cromlechs and stone avenues
of Carnac, in Brittany. Here, too, language and history attest the former
presence of Celtic people; nor could any other race, that influenced the
historical destinies of the North of Gaul, claim such structures as their
own. Even in still more distant places, in the South of France, in
Scandinavia, or Germany, where similar monuments have been discovered,
they may, though more hesitatingly, be classed as Celtic, particularly if
they are found near the natural high roads on which we know that the Celts
in their westward migrations preceded the Teutonic and Slavonic Aryans.
But the case is totally different when we hear of cromlechs, cairns, and
kist-vaens in the North of Africa, in Upper Egypt, on the Lebanon, near
the Jordan, in Circassia, or in the South of India. Here, and more
particularly in the South of India, we have no indications whatever of
Celtic Aryans; on the contrary, if that name is taken in its strict
scientific meaning, it would be impossible to account for the presence of
Celtic Aryans in those southern latitudes at any time after the original
dispersion of the Aryan family. It is very natural that English officers
living in India should be surprised at monuments which cannot but remind
them of what they had seen at home, whether in Cornwall, Ireland, or
Scotland. A description of some of these monuments, the so-called Pandoo
Coolies in Malabar, was given by Mr. J. Babington, in 1820, and published
in the third volume of the "Transactions of the Literary Society of
Bombay," in 1823. Captain Congreve called attention to what he considered
Scythic Druidical remains in the Nilghiri hills, in a paper published in
1847, in the "Madras Journal of Literature and Science," and the same
subject was treated in the same journal by the Rev. W. Taylor. A most
careful and interesting description of similar monuments has lately been
published in the "Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy," by Captain
Meadows Taylor, under the title of "Description of Cairns, Cromlechs,
Kist-vaens, and other Celtic, Druidical, or Scythian