The history of the round shield, the use of buckles and brooches, the custom of cremating the dead, and the distribution of iron in Europe, Asia, and Africa, seem to Professor Ridgeway to point still more sharply to a theory that these features of Greek civilisation previously existed in central Europe and were brought thence into Greece. A study of the dialect in which the Homeric poems are written indicates that the language and metre belonged to the earlier race, the Pelasgians, whom the Achæans conquered. The earliest Greeks spoke an Aryan or Indo-Germanic language of which the Arcadian dialect was the purest remnant, since the Achæans and Dorians never conquered Arcadia. The introduction of labialism into the Greek, Ridgeway believes to be a proof of the Celtic origin of the invaders who accepted, as conquerors usually do, the language of the conquered and yet modified it. “Labialism” is the changing of a hard consonant as “k” into a lip-consonant as “p”--as the older Greek word for horse was “hikkos,” which became “hippos.” The result, then, of Ridgeway’s erudite research is his belief that “the Achæans were a Celtic tribe who made their way into Greece,” and for this theory he asserts that “archæology, tradition, and language are all in harmony.” The original source of this migration,--for it was rather migration than an invasion,--seems to have been in the northwest of the Balkan peninsula. Some extraordinary pressure must have been brought to bear on the Greeks by the Illyrians who may themselves have been forced out of their own homes by some unrecorded power. At the same time the people then living in Macedonia and Thrace were dispossessed and shoved into Phrygia and the regions of Troy in Asia Minor. The possession of Greece by the Greeks was doubtless very gradual and the Peloponnesus was the last to be visited, possibly by boat across the Corinthian Gulf. In some places the new-comers were doubtless compelled to fight, elsewhere they drifted in almost unnoticed and gradually asserted a sway. The new-comers imposed their speech eventually on the older people, but as usual they must have been themselves largely influenced by the older civilisation in the matter of customs and conditions.[a] EARLY CONDITIONS AND MOVEMENTS In the Pelasgic period we find the ancient Greeks in a primitive, but not really barbaric condition. There are settled peoples engaged in agriculture, as well as half nomadic pastoral tribes. The latter form, for a long time, a very unstable element of the population, ever ready under pressure of circumstances to leave their old homes and fight for new ones, bearing disturbance and anarchy into the civilised districts.