It is now time to decide what, for the purposes of this book, it will be best to call the two different branches of the Celts, and their languages. With such familiar terms as “Gael” and “Briton”, “Gaelic” and “British”, ready to our hands, it seems pedantic to insist upon the more technical “Goidel” and “Brython”, “Goidelic” and “Brythonic”. The difficulty is that the words “Gael” and “Gaelic” have been so long popularly used to designate only the modern “Goidels” of Scotland and their language, that they may create confusion when also applied to the people and languages of Ireland and the Isle of Man. Similarly, the words “Briton” and “British” have come to mean, at the present day, the people of the whole of the British Islands, though they at first only signified the inhabitants of England, Central Wales, the Lowlands of Scotland, and the Brythonic colony in Brittany. However, the words “Goidel” and “Brython”, with their derivatives, are so clumsy that it will probably prove best to use the neater terms. In this volume, therefore, the “Goidels” of Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Man are our “Gaels” and the “Brythons” of England and Wales are our “Britons”. We get the earliest accounts of the life of the inhabitants of the British Islands from two sources. The first is a foreign one, that of the Latin writers. But the Romans only really knew the Southern Britons, whom they describe as similar in physique and customs to the Continental Gauls, with whom, indeed, they considered them to be identical.[19] At the time they wrote, colonies of Belgae were still settling upon the coasts of Britain opposite to Gaul.[20] Roman information grew scantier as it approached the Wall, and of the Northern tribes they seem to have had only such knowledge as they gathered through occasional warfare with them. They describe them as entirely barbarous, naked and tattooed, living by the chase alone, without towns, houses, or fields, without government or family life, and regarding iron as an ornament of value, as other, more civilized peoples regarded gold.[21] As for Ireland, it never came under their direct observation, and we are entirely dependent upon its native writers for information as to the manners and customs of the Gaels. It may be considered convincing proof of the authenticity of the descriptions of life contained in the ancient Gaelic manuscripts that they corroborate so completely the observations of the Latin writers upon the Britons and Gauls. Reading the two side by side, we may largely reconstruct the common civilization of the Celts.