It is not necessary here to enter on the question, of curious interest and value, as to whether the primeval state of man was essentially one of barbarism, from whence he progressed by slow degrees to social union, arts, civilisation, and political organisation into communities and nations. The investigations of chronologists the further they are pursued, seem only the more certainly to confer on primitive civilisation a more remote antiquity. At the same time, they confirm the idea, that the long accepted chronology of Archbishop Usher, still attached to our English Bibles, cheats the world, at the lowest computation, of fully 1400 years of its existence--a trifle perhaps in the age of worlds, but no unimportant element in the history of human civilisation, when we remember that between the era of the Mosaic deluge and the accession of the Egyptian Menes, we must account for the peopling of Egypt, the establishment of its social and political constitution, and the founding of a civilisation, the monuments of which are still among the most wonderful that human intellect and labour have produced. Not the least important branch of this inquiry relates to the primeval inhabitants of our own quarter of the globe; of whom as yet we know only with any degree of certainty of the Celtæ, occupying a transitional place in the history of the human family--at once the earliest known intruders and the latest nomades of Europe. It seems probable, from all the traces we can recover of the original condition of this race, that it was more their deficiency than their excess in the energy which we expect to find in the colonists of new regions, that drove them onward in their north-western pilgrimage, until their course was arrested by the Atlantic barriers. They seem to have fled ever forward, like night before the dawn, carrying with them knowledge sufficient to cope with the savage occupants of the wilds they invaded, yet bearing into these few arts but such as still pertain to the primitive races of mankind. In older literary notices of this people, whose language, manners, and arts are still traceable in our own land, we have only a secondary interest, believing that some records of them are recoverable, noted for us long before they had excited foreign interest. But, still more, we doubt not that similar records also preserve the history of older British tribes, in comparison with which the ancient Celtæ must be regarded as of recent origin. "The antiquities of the earlier periods," says a distinguished English antiquary, "including all remains which bear no evident stamp of Roman origin or influence, claim our most careful investigation. Exceedingly limited in variety of types, these vestiges of the ancient inhabitants of Great Britain are not more interesting to the antiquarian collector on account of their rarity, than valuable to the historian. They supply the only positive evidence in those obscure