title="12"/> existed, and this commerce was probably considerable, comprising various metals, salt, amber, etc. Whatever came and went in the course of transcontinental trade from north-western Europe to the Mediterranean countries followed trade routes which lay through the central region north of the Alps, and all this region was held by the Celts. In this way, the Celts seem to be more extensively spread over northern middle Europe than they actually were.

Archæology takes us back farther and tells us more than history in relation to the Celts while they were as yet, so far as we know, located solely or mainly in the mid-European region to the north of the Alps. It is not questioned that the ancient cemetery discovered and explored many years ago at Hallstatt in Upper Austria belonged to Celts and that the curious remains of art and industry found there are the work of a Celtic people. The period assigned for that work begins in the ninth century before the Christian Era and may extend onward for several centuries. The discoveries indicate an organised and progressive community, among whose resources were agriculture and the working of mines for metals and salt; but the principal fact disclosed is that, already in that early time, the Celts were acquainted with the use and manufacture of iron. In the northern parts of Europe, in Scandinavia, Britain and Ireland, as archæologists are agreed, the Iron Age did not make its appearance until several centuries later.

We need not doubt that it was this possession of iron in abundance and of skill in its manufacture, at a time when neighbouring peoples found in bronze the highest class of material for their implements of industry and war, that gave the Celts the power and prosperity which they long enjoyed in Mid-Europe and enabled them to conquer and colonize all the countries that surrounded them.

One effect of the mastery of iron, for a people occupying an inland region with small facilities for water-traffic, was that the Celts acquired a notable skill in the making of vehicles. From them in a later age the Romans borrowed the names of nearly every variety of wheeled vehicle that the Romans used: carrus or carrum, carpentum, esseda, rheda, petorritum. From this it obviously follows that the Celts were also great road-makers. During the nine years that Julius Cæsar spent in the conquest of Transalpine Gaul, and marched his legions in every direction over that vast region, it is quite evident that he was operating in a country already well supplied with roads.

The earliest recorded expansion of the Celts from the region north of the Alps was over northern Italy, and no historian supposes or suggests that the first Celtic occupation of northern Italy was earlier than about 600 B.C. This item ought to be borne in mind, for it has an important bearing on the date of the early Celtic migrations to Britain and Ireland. It was probably about the same time that they began to move westward across the Rhone, occupying the parts of France between the Garonne on the south and the English Channel on the north, which parts are specifically described by Julius Cæsar as Gallia Celtica, Celtic Gaul. Between 500 and 400 B.C. they spread south-westward into Spain, apparently more as conquerors than as colonists, for the resultant of the Celtic occupation of the Spanish Peninsula was the formation of a mixed people, partly Celts and partly Iberians, whom ancient writers distinguish from the Celts by giving them what we may call a hyphenated name, Celtiberians. We are not to imagine from this that Celtic conquests elsewhere were of an exterminating character, or that they did not result in a fusion of peoples. The notion that the migratory conquests of antiquity resulted in the displacement of one population by another is one of the favourite illusions of popular history. In Spain no doubt the Celtic element was relatively less numerous than in Gallia Celtica, and also perhaps the Celtic civilisation became less dominant, for the Iberians were in touch more or less with another and still more highly developed civilisation, that of the Phœnicians. That there was a somewhat distinctive civilisation south of the Garonne is clearly to be inferred from Cæsar's account, which tells us that the people of Celtic Gaul differed from those of Aquitaine, as well as from those of Belgic Gaul, in language, culture, and institutions.

In the fourth century B.C. a second wave of Celtic migration poured over Italy. The Celts in this movement captured and destroyed the city of Rome. But they also appear to have destroyed the predominance of the Etrurians, and thereby to have facilitated the later imperial expansion of the Roman power. There was also an eastward Celtic movement along the Danube. In the third century B.C. the Celts overran most of what is called the Balkan Peninsula, including Greece, and in 278 B.C. large bodies of them passed over into Asia Minor and settled in the country which after them was named Galatia.

Let it be noted at this point that so far as history casts light on the subject, the known period of Celtic expansion on the Continent lies within the years 650 B.C. and 250 B.C. We shall have to recur to this fact when we come to consider, in the following lecture, the probable date of the Celtic colonisation of Ireland. We shall see also that the evidence from archæology leads to the same conclusion as the evidence from history.

History recognises the expansion of the Celts from inland and central Europe southward, westward and eastward, but is silent about any expansion northward. No one doubts that in these early times the parts of Europe northward of the old Celtic country already described were occupied by the Germans, but Greek and Latin writings have no word of the Germans until the last quarter of the third century B.C. Yet we know from archæology that there was trade intercourse long before that time between the Mediterranean countries and the shores of the Baltic, extending even to Scandinavia. As geographical facts, the Baltic and Scandinavia were known to the Greeks, if only vaguely known to them, in the time of Eratosthenes, i.e., about 200 B.C. How is it, then, that the Germans are not mentioned by that name or by any name? I suggest that the reason was that the Germans of that period were so much under Celtic domination that they were not recognised as a distinct people of importance.

The first mention of Germans in history is found in the Roman Acta Triumphalia for the year 222 B.C., in the record of the battle of Clastidium. Clastidium, now called Casteggio, is in northern Italy, on the south side of the river Po and a few miles from that river. It is a little west of the meridian of Milan, which at the time of the battle was Mediolanum, the chief town of the Insubrian Gauls. In the battle, the Roman consul Marcellus overcame the Insubrians and gained the spolia opima by slaying with his own hand their commander Virdumarus. The Acta Triumphalia state that he triumphed "over the Insubrian Gauls and the Germans." Now so far as is known or thought probable there was no German population at the time settled anywhere within hundreds of miles of Clastidium, whereas the Insubrian Gauls were settled on the spot or in its near neighbourhood. Moreover, unless the Germans were there fighting in considerable force, it is most unlikely that any notice of them would have appeared in the record. The commander was a Gaul, bearing an undoubted Celtic name. Therefore the Germans at Clastidium were not