Although my own inquiries deal intimately with graves and names and epitaphs, it still seems to me a possibility that the brains which fashioned exquisitely barbed fish-hooks out of flint, and etched vivid works of art upon pebble, may also have been capable of poetic and even magnanimous ideas. It is quite certain that the artistic sense is superlatively ancient, and it is quite unproven that the lives of these early craftsmen were protracted nightmares. Although not primarily written with that end, the present work will _inter alia_ raise not a few doubts as to the accuracy of Green's dictum: "What strikes us at once in the new England is that it was the one purely German nation that rose upon the wreck of Rome". In the opinion of this popular historian the holiest spot in all these islands ought in the eyes of Englishmen to be Ebbsfleet, the site where in Kent the English visitors first landed, yet inconsequently he adds: "A century after their landing the English are still known to their British foes only as 'barbarians,' 'wolves,' 'dogs,' 'whelps from the kennel of barbarism,' 'hateful to God and man'. Their victories seemed victories for the powers of evil, chastisement of a divine justice for natural sin."[26] It is an axiom among anthropologists that race characteristics do not change and that tides of immigration are more or less rapidly absorbed by the aboriginal and resident stock. Assuredly the characteristics of the German tribes have little changed, and it is extraordinary how from the time of Tacitus they have continued to display from age to age their time-honoured peculiarities. Invited and welcomed into this country as friends and allies, "in a short time swarms of the aforesaid nations came over into the island, and they began to increase so much that they became terrible to the natives themselves who had invited them".[27] According to Bede the first symptoms of the frightfulness which was to come were demands for larger rations, accompanied by the threat that unless more plentiful supplies were brought them they would break the confederacy and ravage all the island. Nor were they backward in putting their threats in execution. Just as the Germans ruined Louvain so the Angles razed Cambridge,[28] and in the words of Layamon "they passed to and fro the country carrying off all they found". Already in the times of Tacitus famous for their frantic Hymns of Hate, so again we find Layamon recording "they breathed out threatenings and slaughter against the folk of the country". Indeed Layamon uses far stronger expressions than any of those quoted by Green, and the British chronicler almost habitually refers to the alien intruders as "swine," and "the loathest of all things".