have occasionally come into possession of them as plunder or spoil after a battle, but such races do not work in precious metals. Tradition, through her younger born sister history, had long told the story of these roving shepherds reaching England from the wilds of Asia. History also says, that in the early days of the roman republic, while Carthage was the proud and merciless queen of the great inland sea, her bold and skilful mariners had formed settlements in England and Ireland, and many writers have asserted that their descendants still exist in Ireland as a distinct people. In England the potent chemistry of the sword and battle-axe soon fused them into a state of greater unity. The tradition is disfigured by many absurd additions, many accounts which are very difficult to believe; but that there is a substratum of truth, I think there can be no doubt. The story of the migration of the scythians is mentioned by the old writers, as a saga of undisputed truth. Bede speaks of it thus, and so does Nennius in the ninth century. Villanueva, who finds phoenician names by every mound and valley in Ireland, and Mr. O'Brien, would laugh to scorn any one who doubted either that the phoenicians made their way into Erin, or that they established there a flourishing empire. Even Mr. Higgins, who profanely says, that it is not a matter of the slightest consequence who the celts and scythians were, who looks upon our authorities, the roman writers, as downright liars and plagiarists, and the romans themselves as low plundering vagabonds, admits that there must have been a migration from Spain. If we now cross the border we find the old legends of Scotland agreed upon two points; that scythians lived there, and that a great people came thither from the East. When Alexander the Third was crowned king, a venerable highland sennachy, with silver beard and scarlet mantle, stood up and sang how the scottish kings sprang from the son of Neol, king of the Athenians, and Scota, daughter of Pharaoh, king of Egypt.* The idea may seem rather far-fetched, the names and even the royal personages themselves are most probably apocryphal, but there may be some small germ of truth in all this. The next place we find them in is Ireland, but as a long interval of tradition exists between their appearance in that country and the period of the earliest known inhabitants, it may be as well first of all to introduce one link in the chain of evidence as to the inhabitants of Scotland, and then take that respecting Ireland up to the time when the scythians arrived. Frequent mention is made in the history of the earliest times in Scotland of the picts. They are said to have been a small people, skilled in carving and building. Now it seems that at an immensely early period there was an old race in Europe akin to the old small-made peruvian race. It was thought that the relics on which this supposition was founded might have been brought to Europe by the followers of Pizarro, but the peruvian skull has been found at Jerusalem, whither it is not all likely the spaniards of that day ever went. When these accounts are connected with what has been discovered respecting the small size of the early lake-dwellers of Switzerland, and their taste for carving and making impleTytler's "Lives of Scottish Worthies." t Wilson's "Prehistoric Man." ments, and with the accounts of the people whose remains have been found in the ancient buryinggrounds of Aurignac and Savigné, their small size and the excellence of their carvings, the fact of lake dwellings being found in Ireland and in Scotland as I have shown; the reader will I think be inclined to admit that tradition and geology directly point to the possibility of a very large portion of these countries having been peopled by a race, of whom the picts were prehaps the last living representatives. It would be interesting if we could class all these little people as tribes united into one common group or type, like the phoenician, jewish, and assyrian groups. That ornaments were made in Scotland long before the times usually assigned to the beginning of a taste for such things, ages and ages before the days of the blue-shielded warriors of Fingal, seems pretty certain. At one of those places in Ayrshire where sea-shells have been found at a height of forty feet above the sea, a rude ornament of cannel-coal was discovered lying upon the boulder clay, or till, as it is called. Sir Charles Lyell, calculating its antiquity from its position, considers that we may assume for it an age of thirty-four hundred years, or about the time when the Israelites went forth from Egypt. If he had added another five hundred years, it is probable he would not have overrated the antiquity of the deposit. Various circumstances, too, render it probable that the ancient scotch, either themselves maintained some intercourse with the people of the mainland and the shores of the Mediterranean, or else occasionally met with persons who had come from these parts of the world. The reader will remember that a short notice of the lake dwellings of Ireland has been given earlier on, and I suppose he is familiar with the famous tradition that long, long ago the waters of Lough Neagh buried a city of the round tower people, and that still, when the lake is clear and the air bright overhead, the fisherman may see the ruins of the ancient city deep beneath the waves. But here science, instead of striving to destroy the bright illusions of legend and poetry, steps forth to offer them her guiding hand, geology reveals lake dwellings in Ireland; geology tells that the builders of such dwellings in Switzerland had clearly been compelled to retreat from the sites first chosen by the encroachments of the waters. it will be said these were not the mysterious highly cultivated round tower builders; very possibly not; but geology says that these lake dwellers selected their sites with such a strong instinctive feeling of what man requires, that up to the present time successive races have been unable to choose better; and if the Swiss of our day still dwell near the old towns buried under their lakes, why should not the round tower builders have chosen the sites of the old irish lake dwellers, for it seems very probable that they came in direct contact with them. But For a large mass of valuable information about the earliest colonies of Ireland we are indebted to the "On Lough Neagh's banks as the fisherman strays, When the clear cold eve's declining, He sees the round towers of other days labours of Villanueva, O'Brien,* and Higgins. Many of the earlier writers, Vallancey and others, adopted and expounded the text that Ireland was peopled from the land of the sun, and was for many centuries a pure fire worshipping land, with far more zeal than prudence. Even Moore, partial as he evidently was to the legend, felt compelled to put it forward as the opinion of antiquarians, and Mr. Petrie, in his prize essay on the ecclesiastical architecture of Ireland, all but overthrew the belief that the round towers were built by these fire worshippers, and that they were at all like the fire temples seen at Bhaugulpore and other places in Asia. Whichever way the question be decided, it will not affect the fact of traces of these great building people being now found in Ireland. Mr. Petrie, sceptical as he is, does not deny the presence of the Firbolgs and Tuath-de-danaans, whom it is quite time to bring upon the stage. I have tried to condense into a short sketch the views of Villanueva and O'Brien, but they are so at discord with each other that it has not been an easy matter to steer wide of no little confusion. According to O'Brien, the first colonists of Ireland were not phoenicians, but the expelled bhudhists of Persia or the Tuath-de-danaans, whom the intolerance of the brahmins and rajahs had driven into exile, and they were the people who brought with them the art of making those beautiful lunettes, fibulæ, gold crowns and pateræ, of which Ireland contains such vast quantities. They arrived in Ireland quite twelve * O'Brien's History of the Round Towers; Phoenician Ireland, translated by Henry O'Brien, Esq., 1833. |