What particularly warrants us in doubting the alleged early and extensive civilization of the Irish, is the very striking circumstance that, previously to the arrival of the Norwegians, they do not appear to have carried on any very great trade, or on the whole to have had any very extensive intercourse with the rest of Europe. This appears particularly from the fact that the Irish at that time (about the year 800) had not yet minted any coins of their own; although their Celtic neighbours in Britain and Gaul had for centuries—that is, from about the birth of Christ—minted a great number, mostly in imitation of Greek and Roman coins. And though the Romans, Franks, and Anglo-Saxons, after their conquests of France and England, had made very considerable coinages in those countries, we do not even find in Ireland any trace of the coins of these neighbouring people being brought over the sea in any considerable quantity before the period mentioned. Yet in other countries, where the minting of coins also came late into use—as, for instance, in the Scandinavian North—so great a quantity of older foreign coins, together with all sorts of foreign valuables, is continually dug up as to show that even at a very early period active connections of trade must have existed between the Northmen and more southern nations. Neither Phenician nor Celtic coins are known to have been found in Ireland, and discoveries even of Roman and the more ancient Anglo-Saxon coins are very rare. That Ireland should have remained for so long a period and to so great an extent unconnected with the neighbouring nations, was undoubtedly caused partly by its remote situation, partly by the indolence of the Irish and the disinclination so general among the Celts to traverse the sea, to which an old author (Giraldus Cambrensis) expressly alludes. It must partly also be ascribed to the peculiar hostile position which the Irish were obliged to assume towards the Romans, Anglo-Saxons, and Franks; since these people having gradually conquered the Celtic countries, France and England, naturally only awaited a favourable opportunity to make themselves masters of Celtic Ireland also. According to this we might even, perhaps, regard the isolation of Ireland as a necessary system of self-defence adopted by the Irish.