A distinguished writer on ethnology lays down certain propositions which he terms fixed points in British ethnology. His first proposition is this: ‘Eighteen hundred years ago the population of Britain comprised peoples of two types of complexion, the one fair, and the other dark. The dark people resembled the Aquitani and the Iberians; the fair people were like the Belgic Gauls.’ His second proposition is, ‘The people termed Gauls, and those called Germans, by the Romans, did not differ in any important physical character.’ These two propositions we may accept as well founded.[184] Certain it is that when the Romans entered Britain and became acquainted with its inhabitants in that part of the island nearest Gaul, they do not record any difference in their physical appearance. On the contrary, Tacitus remarks that they resembled each other in every respect. When the war with the Silures, who occupied territories in the south-west, brought them in contact with that people, Tacitus thus records the result of their observation. Their complexion was different and of a darker hue. Their hair was curly, and they resembled the Iberians: and when Agricola’s campaigns made them acquainted with the inhabitants of Caledonia, the only observation they made was that they were larger-limbed and had redder hair, and in this respect resembled the Germans more than the Gauls. At an early period, the Greek writers, in whom we find the earliest notices of Britain, seem to have had a persuasion that the portion of the inhabitants of Britain who were more particularly connected with the working of tin, possessed peculiarities which distinguished them from the rest. At first they knew only of islands called the Cassiterides, so called from a word signifying tin, as the quarter from whence tin was brought. They then became aware that tin was wrought in Britain as well, and they came to view the Cassiterides as islands lying between Spain and Britain. Diodorus tells us that ‘they who dwell near the promontory of Britain which is called Belerion (Land’s End) are singularly fond of strangers, and, from their intercourse with foreign merchants, civilised in their habits. These people obtain the tin by skilfully working the soil which produces it; this being rocky, has earthy interstices, in which, working the ore, and then fusing, they reduce it to metal; and when they have formed it into cubical shapes, they convey it to a certain island lying off Britain, named Ictis; for at the low tides the intervening space being laid dry, they carry thither in wagons the tin in great abundance.’ He also says, ‘Above the country of the Lusitanians, there are many mines of tin in the little islands called Cassiterides from this circumstance, lying off Iberia, in the ocean, and much of it also is carried across from the Bretannic Isle to the opposite coast of Gaul, and thence conveyed on horses by the merchants, through the intervening Celtic land, to the people of Massilia, and to