The imaginative Dr. Stukeley, in the year 1724, communicated to the Society of Antiquaries a discourse on the use of celts, which is to be found in the Minute Book of the Society. An abstract of it is given by Mr. Lort[120] in his paper subsequently mentioned. Dr. Stukeley undertook to show that celts were British and appertaining to the Druids, who, when not using them to cut off the boughs of oak and mistletoe, put them in their pouches, or hung them to their girdles by the little ring or loop at the side. In a more sensible manner he divided them into two classes, the recipient and the received; that is to say, the socketed, in which the handle was received, and the flat and palstave forms, which entered into a notch in the handle. Borlase,[121] notwithstanding that he was under the impression that a number of socketed celts found at Karnbrê in 1744 were accompanied by Roman coins, one of them at least as late as the time of Constantius I., did “not take them to be purely Roman, foreign, or of Italian invention and workmanship.” He argues that the Romans of Italy would not have made such instruments of brass after Julius Cæsar’s time, when the superior hardness of iron was so well understood, and that metal was so easily to be procured. Farther, that no representations of such weapons occur on the Trajan or Antonine Columns, that few specimens exist in the cabinets of the curious in Italy, where they are regarded as Transalpine antiquities, and that none have been found among the ruins of Herculaneum;[122] nor are any published in the Museum Romanum or the Museum Kircherianum. He concludes that they were made and used in Britain, but that though they were originally of British invention and fabric, they were for the most part made when the Britons had improved their arts under their Roman masters, as most of them seem too correct and shapely for the Britons before the Julian conquest.