aces the _wide houses of the goddess
Demeter_ in Britain. Standing by itself, this is a mysterious passage.
But it has been said that an extract from Avienus will help to explain
it--

----"Hic chorus ingens
Faminei c[oe]tus pulchri colit orgia Bacchi.
Producit noctem ludus sacer; aera pulsant
Vocibus, et crebris late sola calcibus urgent.
Non sic Absynthi prope flumina Thracis alumnae
Bistonides, non qua celeri ruit agmine Ganges,
Indorum populi stata curant festa Lyaeo."

There were maddening orgies amongst the sacred rites of the
Britons--orgies, that whilst they reminded one writer of the Bacchic
dances, reminded another of the worship of Demeter. That these belonged
to the western Britons is an inference from the fact of their being
mentioned by the Greek writers, _i.e._, from those who drew most from
Ph[oe]nician authorities. Avienus, as we have seen, thinks of the Bacchae
as a parallel. So does Pausanius--

"Nec spatii distant Nesidum litora longe;
In quibus uxores Amnitum Bacchica sacra
Concelebrant, hederae foliis tectaeque corymbis."

So does Dionysius Periegetes; indeed the three accounts seem all
referrible to one source. But not so Strabo. That writer, or rather his
authority Artemidorus, finds his parallel in Ceres. "Artemidorus states,
with regard to Ceres and Proserpine, what is more worthy of credit. For
he says, that there is an island near Britain wherein are celebrated
sacred rites, similar to such as are celebrated in Samothrace to these
goddesses."

Strabo's--or rather Artemidorus'--parallel is the same as that of the
Orphic poem, and, probably, is referrible to the same source. Damnonian
Britain, then, or the tin-country, had its orgies--orgies which may as
easily have been Ph[oe]nician as indigenous, and as easily indigenous as
Ph[oe]nician: orgies, too, may have been wholly independent of Druidism,
and representative of another superstition.

[Sidenote: B.C. 57.]

Between the Damnonian Britons of the Land's-end and the Britons of Kent,
as described by Caesar, there may or there may not have been strong
points of contrast. That there were several minor points of difference
is nearly certain. The _a priori_ probabilities arising from the
peculiarities of their industrial occupations and commercial relations
suggest the view; the historical notices confirm rather than invalidate
it. Fragments, however, of this history is all that ca