can be made out,” Professor Freeman holds it to be this, “The Suiones of Tacitus are the Swedes, and the Suiones had ships; so far no one need cavil. But we do not hear of the Suiones or any other Scandinavian people doing anything by sea for several centuries. But though we do not hear of it they must have been doing something. What was it they did? Now in the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries we hear of the Saxons doing a good deal by sea; therefore the name _Saxones_ must be a mistake of the Latin writer’s for _Suiones_.” The assumption that goes through all this, Professor Freeman continues, is that “because the Suiones had ships in the days of Tacitus, as they could not have left off using ships it must have been they who did the acts attributed to the Saxons.” He condescends to admit that “a good deal is involved in this last assumption; it is at least conceivable,” he says, “and not at all unlike the later history of Sweden, that the Suiones went on using their ships, but used them somewhere else, and not on the coasts of Gaul and Britain.” But this begs the question in dispute. Setting aside M. du Chaillu’s conjecture as to the possible confounding of names,[2] the question still remains who were the Saxons? Whether is it more reasonable to believe that the Suiones or Swedes referred to by Tacitus, not to mention the Danes and Norwegians, did not continue to make their descent on the shores of Britain so readily accessible to their fleets, or that the so-named Saxon invader was one and the same with the Scandinavian? “There is nothing very strange,” the _Quarterly_ thinks, “in supposing that some of the ‘Angles’ or ‘Saxons’ may have descended from the Suiones of Tacitus.” M. du Chaillu, it says, “rests his case mainly on the fact that, while the so-called Anglo-Saxon remains found in England correspond minutely with those discovered in enormous quantities in Norway, Sweden and Denmark, there are no traces of such objects in the basins of the Elbe, the Weser, and the Rhine, nor anywhere else, save in places which Scandinavians are known to have visited.” “Every tumulus,” M. du Chaillu says, “described by antiquaries as a Saxon or Frankish grave, is the counterpart of a northern grave, thus showing conclusively the common origin of the people.” Professor Freeman considers M. du Chaillu’s theory “several degrees more amazing than that of Mr. Seebohm,” though why the two should be connected I hardly know. “No one denies,” Mr. Freeman says, that the Scandinavian infusion in England is “real, great, and valuable,” only the date of the Scandinavian descent on the shores of Britain, and the degree and manner of the northern immigration must be taken on the faith of Professor Freeman. According to his account the Scandinavian invasion was an _infusion_ that dates from the ninth century. This is exactly the pivot on which the whole question turns. There are strong grounds for believing that the Northman incursions and