America, and the fertile plains of Africa, have been overrun from time immemorial by tribes of men—savages, perhaps, but nevertheless united in families if not in nations?” We shall not dwell at present upon the relics of these races who have thus preceded all history, and vanished into their graves before a civilised age could behold them. We shall not accompany M. de Perthes in his various excavations, nor, after passing through the first stratum of soil, and coming to the relics of the middle ages, see him meet subsequently, in regular order, with traces of the Roman and Celtic periods, until at last he comes upon weapons, utensils, figures, signs and symbols, which must have been the work of a surpassingly ancient people. We need not describe his discovery of successive beds of bones and ashes, separated from each other by strata of turf and tufa, with no less than five different stages of cinerary urns, belonging to distinct generations, of which the oldest were deposited below the woody or diluvian turf,—nor the coarse structure of these vases (made by hand and dried in the sun), nor the rude utensils of bone, or roughly-carved stone, by which they were surrounded.[30] Neither need we do more than allude to the remains of a fossil whale recently exhumed in Blair Drummond moss, (twenty miles from the nearest point of the river Forth where, by any possibility, a whale could nowadays be stranded), having beside it a rude harpoon of deer’s horn—speaking plainly of the coexistence, in these remote pre-Celtic times, of human inhabitants. Even above ground there are striking relics scattered over Europe which it would be hazardous to assign to any race known to history. Those circles of upright stones, of which Stonehenge is the most familiar example, date back to an unknown antiquity. They are found throughout Europe, from Norway to the Mediterranean; and manifestly they must have been erected by a numerous people, and faithful exponents of a general sentiment, since we find them in so many countries. They are commonly called Celtic or Druidic; not because they were raised originally by Druids, but because they had been used in the Druidical worship, though erected, it may be, for other uses, or dedicated to other divinities,—even as the temples of Paganism afterwards served for the solemnities of Christianity. All that we know is, that, having neither date nor inscription, they must be older than written language,—for a people who can write never leave their own names or exploits unchronicled. The ancients were as ignorant on this matter as ourselves; even tradition is silent; and, at the period of the Roman invasion, the origin of those monuments was already shrouded in obscurity. A revolution, therefore, must have intervened between the time of their erection and the advent of the Legions; and what revolution could it be in those days save a revolution of race? “The Celtæ,” says Dr Wilson,