brought with them, they whose conquests were often only partial could not eradicate the inveterate beliefs of their predecessors, and the result in the end was doubtless some compromise, or else the victory of the earlier faith.

But the Aryan conquerors of Gaul and Italy

themselves were not men who had advanced up the Danube in one generation.  Those men of Aryan speech who poured into the Italian peninsula and into Gaul were doubtless in blood not unmixed with the older inhabitants of Central Europe, and had entered into the body of ideas which formed the religious beliefs of the men of the Danube valley.  The common modifications of the Aryan tongue, by Italians and Celts alike, as compared with Greek, suggests contact with men of different speech.  Among the names of Celtic gods, too, like those of other countries, we find roots that are apparently irreducible to any found in Indo-European speech, and we know not what pre-Aryan tongues may have contributed them.  Scholars, to-day, are far more alive than they ever were before to the complexity of the contributory elements that have entered into the tissue of the ancient religions of mankind, and the more the relics of Celtic religion are investigated, the more complex do its contributory factors become.  In the long ages before history there were unrecorded conquests and migrations innumerable, and ideas do not fail to spread because there is no historian to record them.

The more the scanty remnants of Celtic religion

are examined, the clearer it becomes that many of its characteristic features had been evolved during the vast period of the ages of stone.  During these millennia, men had evolved, concomitantly with their material civilisation, a kind of working philosophy of life, traces of which are found in every land where this form of civilisation has prevailed.  Man’s religion can never be dissociated from his social experience, and the painful stages through which man reached the agricultural life, for example, have left their indelible impress on the mind of man in Western Europe, as they have in every land.  We are thus compelled, from the indications which we have of Celtic religion, in the names of its deities, its rites, and its survivals in folk-lore and legend, to come to the conclusion, that its fundamental groundwork is a body of ideas, similar to those of other lands, which were the natural correlatives of the phases of experience through which man passed in his emergence into civilised life.  To demonstrate and to illustrate these relations will be the aim of the following chapters.

CHAPTER II—THE CHIEF PHASES OF CELTIC CIVILISATION

In the chief countries of Celtic civilisation, Gaul, Cisalpine and Transalpine, Britain and Ireland, abundant materials have been found for elucidating the stages of culture through which man passed in prehistoric times.  In Britain, for example, palæolithic man has left numerous specimens of his implements, but the forms even of these rude implements suggest that they, too, have been evolved from still more primitive types.  Some antiquarians have thought to detect such earlier types in the stones that have been named ‘eoliths’ found in Kent, but, though these ‘eoliths’ may possibly show human use, the question of their history is far from being settled.  It is certain, however, that man succeeded in maintaining himself for ages in the company of the mammoth, the cave-bear, and other animals now extinct.  Whether palæolithic man survived the Ice Age in Britain has not so far been satisfactorily

decided.  In Gaul, however, there is fair evidence of continuity between the Palæolithic and Neolithic periods, and this continuity must obviously have existed somewhere.  Still in spite of the indications of continuity, the civilisation of primitive man in Gaul presents one aspect that is without any analogues in the life of the palæolithic men of the River Drift period, or in that of man of the New Stone Age.  The feature in question is the remarkable artistic skill shown by the cave men of the Dordogne district.  Some of the drawings and carvings of these men reveal a sense of form which would have done credit to men of a far later age.  A feature such as this, whatever may have been its object, whether it arose from an effort by means of ‘sympathetic magic’ to catch animals, as M. Salomon Reinach suggests, or to the mere artistic impulse, is a standing reminder to us of the scantiness of our data for estimating the lines of man’s religious and other development in the vast epochs of prehistoric time.

We know that from the life of hunting man passed into the pastoral stage, having learned to tame animals.  How he came to do so, and by what motives he was actuated, is still a mystery.  It may be, as M. Salomon Reinach has also

suggested, that it was some curious and indefinable sense of kinship with them that led him to do so, or more probably, as the present writer thinks, some sense of a need of the alliance of animals against hostile spirits.  In all probability it was no motive which we can now fathom.  The mind of early man was like the unfathomable mind of a boy.  From the pastoral life again man passed after long ages into the life of agriculture, and the remains of neolithic man in Gaul and in Britain give us glimpses of his life as a farmer.  The ox, the sheep, the pig, the goat, and the dog were his domestic animals; he could grow wheat and flax, and could supplement the produce of his farm by means of hunting and fishing.  Neolithic man could spin and weave; he could obtain the necessary flint for his implements, which he made by chipping and polishing, and he could also make pottery of a rude variety.  In its essentials we have here the beginnings of the agricultural civilisation of man all the world over.  In life, neolithic man dwelt sometimes in pit-dwellings and sometimes in hut-circles, covered with a roof of branches supported by a central pole.  In death, he was buried with his kin in long mounds of earth called barrows, in chambered cairns and cromlechs or dolmens. 

The latter usually consist of three standing stones covered by a cap-stone; forming the stony skeleton of a grave that has been exposed to view after the mound of earth that covered it has been washed away.  In their graves the dead were buried in a crouching attitude, and fresh burials were made as occasion required.  Sometimes the cromlech is double, and occasionally there is a hole in one of the stones, the significance of which is unknown, unless it may have been for the ingress and egress of souls.  Graves of the dolmen or cromlech type are found in all the countries of Western Europe, North Africa, and elsewhere, wherever stone suitable for the purpose abounds, and in this we have a striking illustration of the way in which lines of development in man’s material civilisation are sooner or later correlated to his geographical, geological, and other surroundings.  The religious ideas of man in neolithic times also came into correlation with the conditions of his development, and the uninterpreted stone circles and pillars of the world are a standing witness to the religious zeal of a mind that was haunted by stone.  Before proceeding to exemplify this thesis the subsequent trend of Celtic civilisation may be briefly sketched.

Through the pacific intercourse of commerce, bronze weapons and