Long after these primitive settlers, the first wave of the Celts, seven or eight centuries before Christ, came flooding all over Western Europe, and drove the earlier races into nooks and corners of the earth. They crossed over into Britain after overrunning the lands on the other side of the Channel, and gradually conquered the whole island, as well as its neighbour, Erin. The Celts came in two waves; the first, composed of the people who were called Gael, seem to have appeared many generations before the second, who bore the name of Britons. The Gael are the ancestors of the people of Ireland and the Scotch Highlands, while the Britons occupied the greater part of England and Wales, and are the progenitors of the Welsh of to-day. The old savage race who held the islands before the Celts appeared, were partly exterminated and partly absorbed by the new-comers. The Celts on the eastern side of the island remained unmixed with their predecessors; but into the mountainous districts of the west they penetrated in less numbers, and there the ancient inhabitants were not slain off, but became the serfs of their conquerors. Thus the eastern shore of Britain became a purely Celtic land; but in the districts along the shore of the Irish Sea, where the Gael bore rule, the blood of the earlier race remained, and the population was largely non-Celtic. There are to this day regions where the survival of the ancient inhabitants can be traced by the preponderance of short stature and dark hair among the inhabitants. Many such are to be found both in South Wales and in the Highlands of Scotland. The Gael, therefore, were of much less pure blood than the later-coming Britons. The Britons and their Gaelic kinsmen, though far above the degraded tribes whom they had supplanted, still showed many signs of savagery. They practised horrid rites of human sacrifice, in which they burnt captives alive to their gods, cramming them into huge images of wicker-work. But the barbarous practice which most astonished the ancient world was their custom of marking themselves with bright blue patterns painted with the dye of woad, and this led the Romans to give the northern tribes, who retained the custom longest, the name of the _Picti_, or "painted men." [Illustration: GAEL AND BRITON.] The Celts were a tall, robust, fair-haired race, who had reached a certain stage of civilization. They tilled the fields and sailed the seas, but their chief wealth consisted in great herds of cattle, which they pastured in the forest-clearings which then constituted inhabited Britain. They wore armour of bronze, and used brazen weapons, to which in a later time they added iron weapons also. They delighted to adorn their persons with "torques" or necklaces of twisted gold. Their chiefs went out to war in chariots drawn by small shaggy horses, but alighted, like the ancient Greeks of the Heroic Age, when the hand-to-hand fighting began.