I would, however, point out that the absence of philological evidence of their presence is not conclusive evidence of their absence. If my equation of the bronze swords and the finger-tip pottery with Q speaking people is correct, and the evidence from Italy and the Seine valley seems incontrovertible, the Gaels not only came to England, but settled there in considerable numbers, and even inhabited the southern slopes of the Glamorgan hills. No absence of Goidelic elements in British place-names is proof against such positive evidence. A few of the Gaels may have reached Ireland from the mouth of the Loire, in fact it seems probable that some such movement took place, though positive archæological evidence from the French side is for the present lacking. Lastly there is an idea prevalent in some quarters that at one time there was in Europe a great Celtic empire. Some writers speak of this as though it had been a Gaelic empire. I have been unable as yet to trace this superstition to its source. I suspect that the chapters on Brennius in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Britons[512] are the real foundation for this strange belief, though naturally no-one to-day would base a serious hypothesis upon so shifty a foundation. M. d’Arbois de Jubainville[513] seems to rely mainly on a passage from Livy[514], in which the writer states that Bellovesus and Sigovesus, nephews of Ambigatus, king of the Bituriges, were sent simultaneously on two expeditions. Livy says nothing of an empire, and the movements which he dates at 600 /B.C./ seem to have occurred 300 years later. Déchelette[515] had dealt with this absurd notion according to its deserts. The empire of Ambigatus, if such a thing existed, must have been a Kimric not a Gaelic power. But empires, if we are to understand the word in the sense in which it is ordinarily used, need settled conditions, such as did not prevail in north or north-west Europe until the arrival in the latter region of the _pax Romana_. It is conceivably possible that among the Kimri the tribal chiefs paid some form of loose allegiance to a super-chief, just as the Dorians, and to some extent the Hellenic world, recognised, very occasionally the hegemony of Sparta; but the evidence which we possess from classical sources does not even imply the existence of any such over-lordship among the Celts. In any case such vague hegemony could only have existed among the Kimric tribes, who for a thousand years harried the people of Celtic lands and the Celtic cradle, Gaelic lords or non-Wiro subjects alike. Before their arrival the Gaelic chiefs ruled only in the mountain zone, and the establishment of an empire in a mountainous country, draining into four rivers and four seas, would have been more impossible than in the open steppe. /Appendix I/ CHRONOLOGY