The Celtic and Belgic invasion of Gaul repeated itself, as might be expected, in Britain. Just as the Celts pushed back the Iberian population of Gaul as far south as Aquitania, and swept round it into Spain, so they crossed over the Channel and overran the greater portion of Britain, until the Silures, identified by Tacitus[144] with the Iberians, were left only in those fastnesses that formed subsequently a bulwark for the Brit-Welsh against the English invaders. And just as the Belgæ pressed on the rear of the Celts as far as the Seine, so they followed them into Britain, and took possession of the “Pars Maritima,”[145] or southern counties. The unsettled condition of the country at the time of Cæsar’s invasion was, probably, due to the struggle then going on between Celts and Belgæ. The evidence offered by history as to the distribution of these races confirms that which has been arrived at by the examination of the caves and tumuli. In the one case the Basque peoples are merely known in a fragmentary condition in Britain, Gaul, and Sicily, while in the other those fragments are joined together in such a way as to show that, in the neolithic age, they extended uninterrupedly through Western Europe, from the Pillars of Hercules in the south to Scotland in the north, before they were dispossessed by their broad-headed enemies. It is impossible to define with precision their ethnological relation to the non-Aryan inhabitants of Italy and the coasts of the Mediterranean, such as the Etruscans and Tyrrhenians. I am, however, inclined to hold that they are all branches of the same race of “Melanochroi,” differing far less from each other than the Celtic from the Scandinavian branch of the Aryan family.[146] _Basque Element in present British and French Populations._ This non-Aryan blood is still to be traced in the dark-haired, black-eyed, small, oval-featured peoples in our own country in the region of the Silures, where the hills have afforded shelter to the Basque populations from the invaders.[147] The small swarthy Welshman of Denbighshire is in every respect, except dress and language, identical with the Basque inhabitant of the Western Pyrenees, at Bagnères de Bigorre. The small dark-haired people of Ireland,[148] and especially those to the west of the Shannon, according to Dr. Thurnam and Professor Huxley, are also of Iberian derivation, and singularly enough there is a legendary connection between that island and Spain. The human remains from the chambered tombs as well as the riverbeds prove that the non-Aryan population spread over the whole of Ireland as well as the whole of Britain. The main mass of the Irish population is undoubtedly Celtic, crossed with Danish, Norse, and English blood.