The people of the goddess Danu were not the first divine inhabitants of Ireland. Others had been before them, dwellers in “the dark backward and abysm of time”. In this the Celtic mythology resembles those of other nations, in almost all of which we find an old, dim realm of gods standing behind the reigning Pantheon. Such were Cronos and the Titans, dispossessed by the Zeus who seemed, even to Hesiod, something of a _parvenu_ deity. Gaelic tradition recognizes two divine dynasties anterior to the Tuatha Dé Danann. The first of these was called “The Race of Partholon”. Its head and leader came—as all gods and men came, according to Celtic ideas—from the Other World, and landed in Ireland with a retinue of twenty-four males and twenty-four females upon the first of May, the day called “Beltaine”, sacred to Bilé, the god of death. At this remote time, Ireland consisted of only one treeless, grassless plain, watered by three lakes and nine rivers. But, as the race of Partholon increased, the land stretched, or widened, under them—some said miraculously, and others, by the labours of Partholon’s people. At any rate, during the three hundred years they dwelt there, it grew from one plain to four, and acquired seven new lakes; which was fortunate, for the race of Partholon increased from forty-eight members to five thousand, in spite of battles with the Fomors. These would seem to have been inevitable. Whatever gods ruled, they found themselves in eternal opposition to the not-gods—the powers of darkness, winter, evil, and death. The race of Partholon warred against them with success. At the Plain of Ith, Partholon defeated their leader, a gigantic demon called Cichol the Footless, and dispersed his deformed and monstrous host. After this there was quiet for three hundred years. Then—upon the same fatal first of May—there began a mysterious epidemic, which lasted a week, and destroyed them all. In premonition of their end, they foregathered upon the original, first-created plain—then called _Sen Mag_, or the “Old Plain”,—so that those who survived might the more easily bury those that died. Their funeral-place is still marked by a mound near Dublin, called “Tallaght” in the maps, but formerly known as _Tamlecht Muintre Partholain_, the “Plague-grave of Partholon’s People”. This would seem to have been a development of the very oldest form of the legend—which knew nothing of a plague, but merely represented the people of Partholon as having returned, after their sojourn in Ireland, to the other world, whence they came—and is probably due to the gradual euhemerization of the ancient gods into ancient men.