The Scandinavian Goths (Getæ) and Vandals were held by the ancients to have been originally one and the same people.[1009] Their Bronze Age is supposed to have begun about B.C. 1000, and to have ended in Sweden at the opening of the Christian era. They used short Sword-blades, which made them, unlike the Kelts, formidable in close combat, and the Goths claimed to have introduced the spear[1010] to cavalrymen. Identical weapons were used by the Lemovii of Pomerania and their kinsmen the Rugii. The latter lived on the southern shores of the Baltic about Rugenwald, and this place, one of the focuses of the Stone Age,[1011] preserves, like the Isle of Rugen, the old barbaric name. The Danes mostly affected the long-handed _securis Danica_ (_hasche Danoise_). The Fenni (Finns) of Tacitus had neither Swords nor iron: they used only bows and stone-tipped arrows.[1012] The bronze Sword from Finland ‘with flanged hilt-plate and eight rivet-holes,’[1013] must have found its way there.[1014] [Heading: _THE OLD BRITISH SWORD._] We now proceed to the Keltic population of the ‘Home Islands of Great Britain,’ and find there evident offshoots of the Gauls. We have no metal remains of the pre-Keltic ‘aborigines’ (Iberians? Basques? Finns?) except their palæoliths; and the history of our finds commences with the two distinct Keltic immigrations advocated by Professor Rhys, the Goidels (Gauls) who named Calyddon or Caledonia (_Gael doine_ or _Gael dun_ = forest district) and the Brythons. The authentic annals of England, says Mr. Elton[1015] begin with the days of Alexander the Great, that is, in the fourth century B.C.; the next historical station being the invasion of the Anglo-Saxons[1016] in the middle of the fifth century A.D. He does not trace any continuity of race in Kelt or Saxon with the palæolithic men of the Quaternary Age, or with the short dark-skinned neolithics who succeeded them. The two were followed by a big-boned, round-headed, fair-haired family which brought with them a knowledge of bronze and with it the Sword.