itain, throws any light upon the original occupation of the British
Islands by man; indeed, nothing tells us that Britain, when so occupied,
was an island at all. The Straits of Dover may have existed when the
first human being set foot upon what is now the soil of Kent, or an
isthmus may have existed instead. Whether then it was by land, or
whether it was by water, that the population of Europe propagated itself
into England, is far beyond the evidence of any historical memorial--far
beyond the evidence of tradition. Nothing at present indicates the
nature of the primary migration of our earliest ancestors. Neither does
any historical record tell us what manner of men first established
themselves along the valleys of the Thames and Trent, or cleared the
forests along their watersheds. They may have been as much ruder than
the rudest of the tribes seen by Paulinus and Agricola, as those tribes
were ruder than ourselves. They may, on the other hand, have enjoyed a
higher civilization, a civilization which Caesar saw in its later stages
only; one which Gallic wars, and other evil influences, may have
impaired.

For the consideration of such questions as these it matters but little
whether we begin with the information which the ambition of Caesar gave
the Romans the opportunity of acquiring, or such accounts of the
Ph[oe]nician traders as found their way into the writings of the Greeks;
Polybius (for instance), Aristotle, or Herodotus. A few centuries, more
or less, are of trifling importance. The social condition in both cases
is the same. There was tin in Cornwall, and iron swords in Kent; in
other words, there was the civilization of men who knew the use of
metals, both on the side of the soldiers who followed Cassibelaunus to
fight against Caesar, and amongst the miners and traders of the
Land's-end. In both cases, too, there was foreign intercourse; with
Gaul, where there was a tincture of Roman, and with Spain, where there
was a tincture of Ph[oe]nician, civilization. This is not the infancy of
our species, nor yet that of any of its divisions. For this we must go
backwards, and farther back still, from the domain of testimony to that
of inference, admitting a pre-historic period, with its own proper and
peculiar methods of investigation--methods that the ethnologist shares
with the geologist and naturalist, rather than with the civil historian.
In respect to their results, they may be barren or they may be fertile;