We see, then, that there is no very adequate reason, either in German, Indian, Russian, or any other supposed analogies, why we should not suffer ourselves to be guided in our judgment as to England by English evidence. And this evidence, as we have seen, would lead us to the conclusion that very soon after the English Conquest, if not before, the manor was the prevailing type of social organisation. The further question still remains, what was its origin? This is a question which cannot as yet be answered with certainty; but we are able to point out the possible alternatives. For this purpose we must look for a moment at each of the peoples that have successively occupied England. Fortunately, there is no need to go back to the very beginning, to the palæolithic inhabitants of Britain who dwelt in the caves and along the river-shores. Scanty in number, they were extirpated by the more numerous and warlike race that followed; very much as the Esquimaux, the kinsfolk, as it would seem, of prehistoric cave-men, are being harried out of existence by the North American Indians. There seems no reason to suppose that these people contributed in any measure to the formation of the later population of England.[13] But with the race that took their place, a race of small stature and long heads, the case is different. Ethnologists have long been of opinion that these pre-Aryans were to a large extent the ancestors of the present inhabitants of Western Europe; and they have of late won over to their side a rising school of philologers,[14] some of whom go so far as to explain the whole of modern history as the outcome of a struggle between a non-Aryan populace and a haughty Aryan aristocracy.[15] Without admitting any such hazardous deductions, we may accept the statement that the blood of these pre-Aryan people--_Iberians_, as it has become usual to call them--is largely represented in the English nation of to-day. Mr. Gomme has accordingly hazarded the supposition that our later rural organisation is in part derived from the Iberian race. He maintains that the traces of “terrace-cultivation,” which we come across here and there in England and Scotland, point to a primitive Iberian hill-folk, whose “agricultural system,” in some unexplained way, “became incorporated with the agricultural system of the,” later Aryan, “village community.”[16] His argument turns chiefly on certain alleged Indian parallels. But even if his examples proved the point for India, which is hardly the case, there is in Britain certainly no evidence for Mr. Gomme’s contention. If the terrace-cultivation is to be assigned to a prehistoric people, the archæological data would apparently place it in the bronze period[17]--an age long subsequent to the Celtic immigration. And it will be seen from what we have to say of the Celtic inhabitants at a much later period that it is hardly worth while to dwell upon the possibilities connected with their predecessors.