As far as we can judge, the dwellers in bee-hive huts were the same as those who erected the rude stone monuments, but it does not follow that the Megalithic monument builders did not impose their customs on the race they conquered; and indeed it is possible, even probable, that a people conquering them may have adopted their religious ideas and their methods of interment. It is curious to note how that in legend the subjugated people are supposed to live in earth mounds. No story is more common than that of a man passing a mound at night and seeing it open, and finding that merriment and drinking are going on within. Sometimes children are snatched away, and are brought up in these mounds. He who desires to have a sword of perfect temper goes to one of the mounds, taps, and bargains with the mound-dweller to make him a sword. The name now given to the race--not a pure, but a mixed one--that occupied the land before the dawn of history, is Ivernian. It was a dark-haired and sallow-complexioned race. The Kelt was fair; and if in Ireland, and in Cornwall, and in France so much dark hair and dusky skin is found, this is due to the self-assertion of the primitive race that was subjugated by the blue-eyed, fair-haired conquerors from the Black Sea and the Danube. What was the conquered race? “What,” asks the author of “Chaldæa,” in the “Story of the Nations,” “What is this great race which we find everywhere at the very roots of history, so that not only ancient tradition calls them ‘the oldest of men,’ but modern science more and more inclines to the same opinion? Whence came it?” And the answer Mme. Ragozin gives to the question is--that this was the yellow Turanian people which overflowed from the steppes of Northern Asia, which carried with it thence acquaintance with the metals, and through this acquaintance established itself as masters wherever it went. That may be, but before this Ivernian race arrived in the west, whatever it was, it found that man had been on the soil before it--aye, and for ages on ages--occupying caves, hunting the reindeer and the horse, ignorant of the art of the potter, and yet in some particulars his superior in intellectual power.[16]