History finds them for the first time located about the upper reaches of the Danube, in the lands corresponding to modern Bavaria, Wurtemburg, Baden, and the country drained by the Maine to the east of the Rhine. The idea of an ingress from Asia has lately been abandoned. Research seems to have effectively exploded it.[2] They were barbarians from our point of view, not savages; not civilised, but apparently a good stage onward from earlier types. It was they who gave names to many of the rivers and mountains of Europe—“names which are poems,” says Matthew Arnold, “and which imitate the pure voices of nature.” Hyperboreans they seemed to have been called by the original Greeks, but since the time of Hecatæus and Herodotus, that is, from about 500 B.C., they came to be known to the classic writers as κελται or κελτοι—a name which at that early period the Greeks applied indiscriminately to all the people of north and west Europe who were not Iberians. To them, as well as to the Romans, all that stretch of the Continent appeared to be occupied mainly by κελτοι. And though the Germans lived from time immemorial beyond them in the north, not till the first century B.C. did the Romans discover that they were a different people. Cæsar himself was one of the earliest to observe and chronicle the fact. But there were reasons for this apparent ubiquity of the Celts. Apart from their chronic unrest and frequent migrations, we can well understand why the Germans appeared merged in them. The Germans were early deprived of their independence, and held in slavish subordination till they recovered their freedom about 300 B.C. For centuries before that date, conqueror and conquered apparently lived under a common regime, obeying the same chiefs, and fighting in the same armies, though generally in the relation of dominant masters and subject slaves. In this way they even came to have many words in common, as their respective languages show. At what time the Celts entered Gaul, Britain, and Ireland is a question unhappily beyond the knowledge of man. The seventh century B.C., or even the tenth as the Irish tradition maintains, is given as an approximate date. But of this there is no authentic record. Nor yet of a second immigration assumed to have followed in the third century B.C. That there were two such invasions of Britain with a considerable interval between them is one of the pet theories of philology. For two branches of an originally parent stock may be traced, known as the Gadelic and the Brittonic, or more recently as the Q and P groups. The one includes the Irish, Manx, and Gaelic-speaking peoples, and was the earlier to arrive; the other embraces the Welsh, Cornish, and Breton, who came later. This linguistic fact might be represented tabularly, thus:—