long skulls, out of the long barrows of Britain and Ireland, were of the Basque or Iberian type, and Professor Huxley holds that the river-bed skulls belong to the same race. We have therefore proofs that an Iberian or Basque population spread over the whole of Britain and Ireland in the neolithic age, inhabiting caves, and burying their dead in caves and chambered tombs, just as in the Iberian peninsula also in the neolithic age.’[193] [Sidenote: Ethnologic traditions.] Of the Celtic race, which succeeded the Iberians in the British Isles, and whose descendants still remain here, the Romans tell us nothing, save that those in the interior of the country were believed to be indigenous, and that those on the regions bordering upon the sea which divides Britain from Gaul had passed over from the latter country; but here we have the advantage of possessing an additional element of information in their traditions. These represent, in more or less of an archaic form, the popular notions prevailing among the people themselves of their ethnology, their supposed descent, and their mutual relation to each other. They usually appear in two different shapes—one in which the tribes inhabiting the same country, but distinguished from each other by national or ethnological differences, appear as successive colonies, arriving at different times in the country from distant regions, founded either upon genuine tradition or artificially upon some fancied resemblance in name or characteristic; the other, where each race is represented by an ‘eponymus’ from whom they are supposed to have been descended, and to have derived their name, and these supposed eponymic ancestors are connected together in an artificial family, in which the paternal ancestor represents the race, and the maternal the country or city they occupy. An analysis of these legends, then, is an almost indispensable preliminary to any attempt to ascertain their true place in the ethnology of the island. [Sidenote: British traditions.]