There could hardly be a better example of the uneasy movement of Aryan migrations than the history of the settlement of the British Isles. We find them, first of all, as far back as we can look, inhabited by an unknown population who left their barrows and tumuli dotted about the country, whose society seems to have been matriarchally organized, and who, if the name _Pict_ may be taken as any indication, probably had the habit of painting or tattooing their bodies. At length, several centuries before our era, the first Aryan wave reaches these shores in the persons of the Celts, who spread over England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, where they have been pointed out and variously described by historians as _Britons_, _Ancient Britons_, _Welsh_, _Gaels_, _Celts_,... They settle down and live for some centuries the primitive life of savages, till half-way through the first century B.C. they are disturbed by a little Aryan tongue reaching out from the well-nigh spent Italian wave. Pagan Rome establishes a brief dominion over a small portion of Britain, drives roads, builds camps and cities, and after some four hundred years is sucked back again to the Continent. Another century, and the Angles and Saxons, borne forward on the crest of the Teutonic wave, overrun the main island, driving the Celts into its extremities, whence they regurgitate, before finally settling down, upon various military and missionary enterprises which have played an important part in our history. But already another ripple of the Teutonic wave is upon us, rocking over the seas in the long boats of the Scandinavian Vikings, and almost before they have left their impress on the eastern quarter of the land, a third—the Normans this time—is breaking on Britain once again at Pevensey. The liquid metaphor is unavoidable, for no other image seems adequate to express what actually happened. To watch through the glasses of history the gradual arrival and settlement of the Aryans in this country is to be reminded irresistibly of the rhythmic wash and backwash, the little accidental interplays of splash and ripple, which accompany the tide as it fills an irregularly shaped pool.