ORIGIN OF THE BRITONS.--KELTS OF GAUL.--THE BELGAE.--WHETHER KELTIC
OR GERMAN.--EVIDENCE OF CAESAR.--ATTREBATES, BELGAE, REMI, DUROTRIGES
AND MORINI, CHAUCI AND MENAPII.

Of the two branches of the Keltic stock the British will be considered
first, and that in respect to its origin.

It is rare that the population of an island is without clear, definite,
and not very distant affinities with that of the nearest part of the
nearest continent. The Cingalese of Ceylon can be traced to India; the
Sumatrans to the Malayan Peninsula; the Kurile Islanders to the
Peninsula of Sagalin; the Guanches of Teneriffe to the coast of Barbary.
The nearest approach to isolation is in the island of Madagascar, where
the affinities are with Sumatra, the Moluccas and the Malay stock rather
than with the opposite parts of Africa, the coasts of Mozambique and
Zanguibar. But Madagascar has long been the great ethnological mystery.
Iceland, too, was peopled from Scandinavia and not from Greenland.

It is in Gaul, then, that we must look for the mother-country of Kelts;
at least in the first instance, for Gaul is the nearest point--the
white cliffs of Folkstone being within sight of the opposite shore. Yet
(as an example of the extent to which one ethnological question depends
upon another) the Gallic origin of the earliest Britons has been
objected to. For a _Keltic_ population, indeed, it has been admitted to
be the natural area; but we have seen that a population other and
earlier than the Keltic has been inferred from the shape of the skulls,
and other phenomena of the Stone period. Now for such a population as
this, Jutland or Sleswick has been considered the more likely locality,
since the skulls in question have been compared to those of the
Laplanders and Finns; and, if this be true, the further north we carry
the home of the British aborigines, the less we find it necessary to
bring the Finn or Lap families southward. This reasoning is valid if the
original fact of any _pre_-Keltic population be true. Those, however,
who doubt the premises, have no need to refine upon the current notion
of Gaul being the original home of the Britons. Gaul, then, is the
ground from which we take our view of the great Keltic division of the
human species in its integrity; for, hitherto, we have seen but the
western offsets of it.

That the country between the Seine and Garonne, corresponding with the
provinces of Normandy, Brittany, Mai