tence occurs a few lines lower. The British Isles are
spoken of--

----"where (are) the wide houses of Demeter."

This will be noticed in the sequel.

No reason for excluding these lines lies in the fact of their being
forgeries. Provided that they were composed before the time of Caesar,
the authorship matters but little. If, as is the common practice, we
attribute them to Onomacritus, a cotemporary of Mardonius and Miltiades,
they are older than the notice of Herodotus.

It cannot be denied that these _data_ for the times anterior to Caesar
are scanty. A little consideration will shew that they can be augmented.
Between the time of Julius Caesar and Claudius--a period of nearly a
hundred years--no new information concerning Britain beyond that which
was given by Caesar himself, found its way to Rome; since neither
Augustus nor Tiberius followed up the aggressions of the Great Dictator.
Consequently, the notices in the "_Bellum Gallicum_" exhaust the subject
as far as it was illustrated by any Roman observers. Now if we find in
any writer of the time of Augustus or Tiberius, notices of our island
which can not be traced to Caesar, they must be referred to other and
earlier sources; and may be added to the list of the _Greek_
authorities.

If we limit these overmuch, we confine ourselves unnecessarily. Inquiry
began as early as the days of Herodotus; and opportunities increased as
time advanced. The Baltic seems to have been visited when Aristotle
wrote; and between his era and that of Polybius the intellectual
activity of the Alexandrian Greeks had begun to work upon many branches
of science--upon none more keenly than physical geography.

From the beginning of the Historical period, the first-hand
information--for it is almost superfluous to remark that none of the
Greek authors speak from personal observation--flows from two sources;
from the inhabitants of western and southern Gaul, and from the
Ph[oe]nicians. The text of Herodotus suggests this. In the passage which
has been quoted, he speaks of the _Kassiterides_; and _Kassiterides_ is
a term which a Ph[oe]nician only would have used. No Gaul would have
understood the meaning of the word. It was the Asiatic name for either
tin itself, or for some tin-like alloy; and the passage wherein it
occurs is one which follows a notice of _Africa_.

In two other passages, however, the consideration of the populations and
geography of Western Europe is approached