Strange as the assertion may appear, it is susceptible of many proofs, that the now degraded and dwindled Celts were originally the most powerful and widely dispersed people of the earth, boasting simultaneously a geographical extent and political importance, which have been achieved only by successive generations of the Gothic branches of the Indo-Germanic nations. The Aborigines, Autochthones, Gigantes, Titanides (all which names signify earth-born), Atlantides, Cyclopeans, Pelasgi, Umbri, Etrusci and Sikeli, the Iotuns in Scandinavia, Pali in India, Kaous in Persia, Hycsos in Egypt, may all equally, by plausible and unanswerable facts, be surmised to have been Celts, with whom the immigrators of other races waged continual wars for possession of the earth. All the myths—so universal—of the wars of the gods and the giants, relate to wars between the invading conquerors and the primitive inhabitants, who are everywhere to be traced by their gigantic works of unhewn stone, cromlechs, stone circles, &c., not referable to any historic period, because the conquerors destroyed all records of their architects, and then, in idiotic wonder at their vast dimensions, referred them to gigantic first possessors of the earth. Whether the original stature of the Celts was greater than that of the Gothic nations, may be doubted; but it is a curious fact that nearly all the modern European giants have been Celts, and immense stature was a common property of the wild Irish of former generations. The existing Celtic races call for more extended observation. As an un-Gothicized nation, the Irish is the only remnant of a people which probably was at one time thinly spread over the whole of Europe. Nearly related to, if not originally identical with, the Goths, yet naturally of a less vigorous constitution and lower habit of mind, the Celts rapidly gave way before, or irretrievably amalgamated themselves with, their Pelasgian invaders in Greece and Italy, and their Gothic invaders in Trans-Alpine Europe. Thus, at one time losing themselves in the overwhelming flood of their invaders, like the waters of a lake inundated by the sea; at another, retreating westerly before the oncoming torrent, the Celtic nations have gradually almost disappeared from continental Europe, and alone find a miserable home and wretched abiding-place on the most eastern shores of the Atlantic, and the most western corners of the Old World. If the Atlantic could have afforded them a footing upon its turbulent waters, they would long since have been driven into it by their rapacious invaders. The complaint of the unhappy Celts has, ever since they were hunted to the extreme west of Europe, been the same, “Our enemies drive us into the sea; and the sea drives us back upon our enemies.”