We cannot, however, fail to recognize the evidence of facts. We can understand how men were everywhere impelled to raise mounds above the bodies of their ancestors, to perpetuate their memory or to enclose their mortal remains between flat stones to save them from being crushed by the weight of earth above them. We may even, by straining a point, admit the idea that a large cist developed into a dolmen, but when in districts separated by enormous distances we see monuments with the wall pierced with a circular opening or combining an interior crypt with an external mound and dolmen, it is impossible to look upon these close resemblances as the result of an accidental coincidence, and equally impossible to fail to conclude that the men whose funeral rites were remarkable for such close similarity belonged to the same race. What then was this race? Are these monuments witnesses of the great Aryan immigration which was for so long supposed to have spread from India over the continents of Asia and Europe, and of which the Indo-European languages were said to preserve the memory? Or is it really the fact that a relationship of language does not imply a relationship of race? Were the builders of the dolmens Celts or Gauls, Ligures or Cymri? was Henry Martin right in ascribing to the Cimerii of Scandinavia the erection in the Bronze age of the megaliths of Ireland? Was it the Turanians, with their worship of ancestor’s, their respect for the tombs of their forefather’s, and their desire to perpetuate their memory to eternity, who set up the dolmens of Brittany? Was it not perhaps rather the Iberians, whose descendants still people Spain and the north of Africa? According to Maury, the distribution of the megalithic monuments of Europe marks the last refuge of vanquished Neolithic races, fleeing before their conquerors. All these hypotheses are plausible, all can be defended by arguments, the weight of which it is impossible to deny, but none are capable of conclusive proof, none can finally convince the student.33 An old Welsh poet, referring to the long barrows of his native land, says that they are altogether inexplicable, and that it is impossible to decide who set them up or who is buried beneath them. And surely this ancient bard34 is right even now. Vainly do we question these silent witnesses of the remote past. They give us no answer, and we can but repeat here what we said at the beginning of this inquiry: Human science is powerless to lift the veil biding the early history of humanity. Will it ever be so? Or will the day yet dawn when the veil will be rent asunder at last? Time alone can solve this question, which is one of those secrets of the future as difficult to fathom as those of the past. 1 Bateman: “Ten Years’ Diggings,” Preface, p. 11. 2 W. MacAdams: “The Great Mound of Cahokia.” Am. Ass., Minneapolis, 1883. 3 Pelagaud: “Préhistoire en Syrie.”