The first authentic particulars relating to the ancient Britons are derived from Cæsar who made his descent in the year 55 before Christ. The original inhabitants appear to have been Celts from France and Spain. We learn from the Roman historian that they had been driven into the interior and western portion of the island by the Belgae who settled on the east and south-eastern shores of England, and were now known as Britons. He tells us in language, about which there can be no misconception, that the Belgae were descended from the Germans. These were the Britons with whom Cæsar had to do, and these the Romanized Britons who, in their dire extremity, sent forth their despairing cry to the gates of Imperial Rome, “The barbarians drive us to the sea, and the sea to the barbarians.” Prichard demonstrated, at least to his own satisfaction, that “the ancient Belgae were of Celtic, and not of Teutonic race, as had previously been supposed,” and ethnologists are agreed in setting aside the testimony of Cæsar! What amount of hypothetical evidence is sufficient to overturn an historic fact? It might be difficult to say who is an authority on language, but anyone reasonably endowed with judgment may be an authority on matters of fact and practical sense. The science of language is not an exact science, and leaves a good deal of room for the imagination to play. I would rather doubt the conclusions of philologers than believe that the Roman historian wrote without knowledge of his subject, or deliberately stated what he had no means of knowing to be true. The weight of evidence is certainly on the side of Cæsar. Not all the ingenuity of all the Bopps and Grimms and Potts and Zeusses who ever applied themselves to the elucidation of this most obscure of all unintelligible subjects can ever be sufficient to overturn an outside historical fact. “In the history of all nations,” Pinkerton says, “it is indispensable to admit the most ancient authorities as the sole foundation of any knowledge we can acquire. If we reject them or pretend to refute them no science can remain, and any dreamer may build up an infinite series of romances from his own imagination. When, therefore, a modern pretends to refute Cæsar and Tacitus in their accounts of the inhabitants of ancient Britain, any man of science would disdain to enter the field.” It does not by any means follow that every scholar who is familiar with the structural peculiarities of language has necessarily any aptitude for perceiving the exact relations of things. Many distinguished men eminent in literature have been singularly deficient in ordinary reasoning power. The late Charles Kingsley, it is well known, “could not discern truth from falsehood.” Though occupying “an historical chair, he lacked every qualification of an historian.”