We find within the boundaries of the district very few traces of Palæolithic man: the earliest inhabitants, who have left well-marked memorials of themselves, were Iberians, a non-Aryan race, still represented by the Basques of the Pyrenees and by certain inhabitants of Wales. They were short of stature, swarthy of skin, dark of hair, long-skulled. Their characteristic weapon or implement was a stone axe, ground, not chipped, to a sharp edge; they buried their dead in a crouching attitude in the long barrows which are still to be seen in certain parts of Dorset, chiefly to the north-east of the Stour Valley. When and how they came into Britain we cannot tell for certain; it was undoubtedly after the glacial epoch, and probably at a time when the Straits of Dover had not come into being and the Thames was still a tributary of the Rhine. They were in what is known as the Neolithic stage of civilisation; but in course of time, after this country had become an island, invaders broke in upon them, Aryans of the Celtic race, probably (as Professor Rhys thinks, though he says he is not certain on this point) of the Goidelic branch. These men were tall, fair-haired, blue-eyed, round-skulled, and were in a more advanced stage of civilisation than the Iberians, using bronze weapons, and burying their dead, sometimes after cremation, in the round barrows that exist in such large numbers on the Dorset downs. Their better arms and greater strength told in the warfare that ensued: whether the earlier inhabitants were altogether destroyed, or expelled or lived on in diminished numbers in a state of slavery, we have no means of ascertaining. But certain it is that the Celts became masters of the land. These men were some of those who are called in school history books “Ancient Britons”; the Wessex folk in after days called them “Welsh”—that is, “foreigners”—the word that in their language answered to βάρβαροι and “barbari” of the Greeks and Romans. What they called themselves we do not know. Ptolemy speaks of them as “Durotriges,” the name by which they were known to the Romans. Despite various conjectures, the etymology of this word is uncertain. The land which they inhabited was, as already pointed out, much isolated. The lofty cliffs from the entrance to Poole Harbour to Portland formed a natural defence; beyond this, the long line of the Chesil beach, and further west, more cliffs right on to the mouth of the Axe. Most of the lowlands of the interior were occupied by impenetrable forests, and the slow-running rivers, which even now in rainy seasons overflow their banks, and must then, when the rainfall was much heavier than now, have spread out into swamps, rendered unnavigable by their thick tangle of vegetation. The inhabitants dwelt on the sloping sides of the downs, getting the water they needed from the valleys, and retiring for safety to the almost innumerable encampments that crowned the crests of the