XII

WHO WERE THE "CELTS" PROPERLY SO-CALLED?

Disclosing identity of Early British "Celts" or Kelts

and "Culdees" with the "Khaldis" of Van

and the Picts.

"The so-called Celtic Question, than which no greater stumbling block in the way of clear thinking exists . . . there is practically to-day a complete unanimity of opinion among physical anthropologists that the term Celt, if used at all, belongs to the brachycephalic [round-headed] darkish population of the Alpine [Swiss] highlands . . . totally lacking in the British Isles."

—W. Z. RIPLEY, Races of Europe, 124, 126, 305.

RIGHTLY to elicit the real racial agency by which uncivilized Ancient Britain became Aryanized in Language, High Culture and Civilized Institutions in the pre-Roman period, it is still necessary us to re-examine and strive to solve the vexed question of "The Celts"; for the existing confusion in the use of this term forms one of the greatest obstacles to clear thinking on the subject, as cited in the heading. And this gross confusion has been a chief cause of the delay hitherto in solving the Origin of the Britons and the Aryan Question in Britain.

At the outset we are confronted by the paradox that, while philologists and popular writers generally in this country assume that the "Celts" were Aryans in race as well as in language, and were the parents of the Brythons or Britons, and the Scots and Irish—notwithstanding that the "Early Britons" are also called non-Aryan pre-Celtic aborigines—on the other hand, scientific anthropologists and classic historians have proved that the "Celts" of history were the non-Aryan, round-headed, darkish, small-statured race of south Germany and Switzerland, and that "Celts" properly so-called are "totally lacking in the British Isles." {But see later.} Thus, to speak, as is so commonly done, of "Celtic ancestry," the "Celtic temperament" and "Celtic fire" amongst any section of the natives of these islands, is, according to anthropologists, merely imaginary!

The term "Celt" or "Kelt" is entirely unknown as the designation of any race or racial element or language in the British Isles, until arbitrarily introduced there a few generations ago. Nor does the name even exist in the so-called "Celtic" languages, the Gaelic, Welsh and Irish. It is, on the contrary, the classic Greek and Latin title of a totally different race of a totally different physical type from that of the British Isles, and that word was only introduced there by unscientific philologists and ethnologists some decades ago.

The "Celts" or "Kelts" first appear in history, under that name, in the pages of Herodotus (480-408 B.C.). He calls them "Kelt-oi" and locates them on the continent of Western Europe.

He says: "For the Ister [Danube], beginning from the Kelt-oi . . . divides Europe in its course; but the Kelt-oi [of Gaul?] are beyond the pillars of Hercules, and border on the territories of the Kunēsi-oi or Kunet-oi [supposed to be Finnistere] who live the furthest to the west of all the peoples of Europe." {Herodotus ii, 33; iv, 49; also Xenophon (d. 359 B.C.) Hellenica, vii, 1, 20.}

Strabo, writing a few decades after Cæsar's epoch, gives further details regarding the ancient Greek information on the Celts, whom he calls "Kelt-ai":

He says: "The ancient Greeks . . . afterwards becoming acquainted with those natives towards the west, styled them 'Kelt-āi.' [Kelts] and 'Iberi-ēn' [Iberians], sometimes compounding the names into 'Kelti-Iberien' or 'Kelto-Scythian'—thus ignorantly uniting various distinct nations." {S. i, 2, 27.}

Strabo habitually uses the term "Keltica" or "Land of the Kelts" for Gaul, which corresponded generally to modern France including Switzerland, and defines it thus:—

"Keltica" is bounded on the [south-] west by the mountains of the Pyrenees, which extend to either sea, both the Mediterranean and the ocean; on the east by the Rhine; on the north by the ocean from the north[west]ern extremity of the Pyrenees to the mouth of the Rhine; on the south by the sea of Marseilles and by the Alps from Liguria [Genoa] to the sources of the Rhine." {S. iv, 1, 1; and compare ii, 1, 17, etc.}

He excludes Iberia or Spain-Portugal from Keltica, noting, "The Pyrenees chain . . . divides Keltica from Iberia"; but he adds "Ephorus extends the size of Keltica too far, including within it what we now designate as 'Iberia' as far as Gades [Cadiz]. {Ib. iii, 1, 3 and iv, 4, 6.} He includes Liguria [Genoa and Piedmont on the Italian side of the Alps] whose people he says were named by the Greeks "Kelto-Ligues," or Kelto-Ligurian. {Ib. iv, 4, 3.} It is also noteworthy that he calls the inhabitants of "Keltica" or Gaul not only "Kelt-āi" but also them and their land repeatedly "Galatic," {Ib. iii, 1, 3; iv, 4, 2.} (i.e., a variant of Galatia and Kelt) and he includes the Belgae as Kelts. {Ib. iv, 4, 1.}

But Strabo, like Cæsar and all other Greco-Roman writers without exception, expressly excludes Britain from Keltica or "The Land of the Celts." Thus he writes: "its (Britain's) longest side lies parallel to Keltica [Gaul]." {Ib. iv, 5, 1.} And he emphasizes the difference between the physical appearance of the inhabitants of Britain and the Kelts or Celts of Gaul, describing the latter, the Celts, as a short-statured race with light -yellow hair. {Ib. iv, 5, 2.}

Cæsar also, in the well-known opening paragraph in his Commentaries, whilst affirming the identity of the Celtæ or "Celts" with the Galli or "Gauls," restricts the title "Celt" to Mid-Gaul west of the Seine, that is to Old Brittany, with Armorica, the Loire Valley, and Switzerland. He says:

"All Gaul (Gallia) is divided into three parts, one of which the Belgæ inhabit, the Aquitani another, those who, in their own language, are called 'Celts' (Celtæ), in ours 'Gauls' (Galli), the third." {D.B.G. i, 1.}

[p. 130] And neither Cæsar, nor Tacitus, nor any other of the Greek or Roman historians or writers ever refer to the Celts or Kelts as inhabitants of Britain or of Hibernia.

In British history and literature the first mention of Celts appears to be in 1607 in an incidental reference to the Celts not in Britain but in France; {Topsell, Fourfold Beast, 251.} and again, in 1656, in Blount's Glossography which defines "Celt, one born in Gaul," {For these and subsequent references to early English occurrence of the name "Celt," see Dr. Murray's Oxford English Dictionary, "Celt."} and again, in 1782, contrasting the British with the Celts in Gaul in the sentence: "the obstinate war between the insular Britons and the continental Celts." {Warton, Hist. Kiddington, 67.} But all of these references are unequivocally to the Celts in France, and not in Britain.

The manner in which the notion of a "Celtic" ancestry for the British, Scots and Irish was insidiously introduced into British literature now becomes evident, and affords a striking example of the inception and growth of a false theory. The credit for the first introduction of this notion into Britain—a notion which by frequent repetitions and accretions grew to be "the greatest stumbling-block to clear thinking" on the Celtic Question—now appears to be due to a Mr. Jones. In 1706 he published an English translation of Abbé Pezron's book issued in 1703 on "Antiquité de la Nation et de la Langue des Celtes," under the title of "Antiquities of Nations, more particularly of the Celts or Gauls, taken to be originally the same people as our Ancient Britains," {Murray, English Dict., re "Celt."} in which he gave currency to that theory of M. Pezron. The seed thus thrown into receptive British soil seems to have taken root and grown into a sturdy tree, which now is popularly believed to be indigenous. Thus, in 1757, Tindal, in translating Rapin's History of England, says in his introduction (p. 7) "Great Britain was peopled by the Celtæ or Gauls." And, in 1773, the theory that the Celts were ancestors of the Gaels had become current in Skye, for Mr. McQueen, in a discussion there with Samuel Johnson, says: "As they [the Scythians] were the ancestors of the Celts [in sense of British] the same religion might be in Asia Minor and Skye." {Boswell, Life of Johnson, III. Hebrides Tour, Sept. 18th.} And, by 1831, the seedling Celtic tree had become established in Britain as a mighty monarch of the forest which sheltered the Aryan theory of the Celts under its branches with the Celts as full-blooded Aryans in race. In that year Dr. Prichard, the ethnologist and philologist, in his "Eastern Origin of the Celtic Nations," describes the supposititious "British Celts" as Aryans in race, and ascribes to them the introduction of the various Aryan dialects current, before the Anglo-Saxon period, in the British Isles. And, in 1851, Sir Daniel Wilson, the antiquary, calls the British Isles "the insular home of the Keltai." {W.P.G., 472.} The transformation of the people of the British Isles into "Celt" was then complete.

The older philologists were thus mainly responsible for this arbitrary extension of the name "Celtic" in a racial sense to the earlier inhabitants of the British Isles. The confusion arose through the popular misconception that because a people spoke a dialect of the same group of languages they were necessarily of the same race. The confusion began with the observation by the Drench philologists that the language of the Celts in Brittany or Mid-Gaul, or "Celtic" speech, as it was naturally called by them, was essentially similar in structure to that of the Brythonic or Cymri speech of the Welsh and the Breton of Brittany in Gaul. This Brythonic language was then presumed to be a branch of the Celtic of Gaul, and the term "Celtic" applied to it, and then extended in a racial sense to the Welsh people who spoke it. Similarly, the Gaelic or Gadhelic {Irish Gaedhlig, Scottish Gaelic Gaidhlig, from Irish-Scot Gaodhal and Welsh Gwyddel, a Gael or inhabitant of Ireland and Northern Scotland.} speech of the Irish and the Scottish Highlanders was also found to have affinity with the Gallic and Welsh "Celtic," and all the people speaking those languages were also dubbed "Celts." The linguistic affinities on which this racial kinship was assumed, were tabulated in two groups by Dr. Latham in 1841, {R. G. Latham, M.D., English Language, 1841.} based on the classification by Prichard and C. Meyer; and this still remains the recognized classification of the "Celtic" dialects, of which the Gaelic is considered to be the more primitive and older.

CELTIC GROUP OF LANGUAGES.

I. Gallic or Cymric. II. Gaelic or Erse.

1. Cymric or Welsh 1. Fenic or Erse or Irish

2. Cornish (now extinct) 2. Gaelic or Highland Scottish

3. Armorican or Breton 3. Manx

["Celtic" proper]

Still further had the Celtic theory grown apace. This so-called "Celtic Race" was also called "Aryan" in race, when it was observed that their language was akin to the languages which had latterly been classed as "Aryan." This essentially racial title of "Aryan" had been introduced into English and other European languages by the discovery, in 1794, by the erudite Sir William Jones, the Chief Justice of Calcutta, that the Sanskrit language of the ancient Hindoos, who called themselves "Arya," was radically and structurally of the same type as the Old Persian, Greek, Latin, Celtic, English, and German (or "Teutonic") languages of Europe, {This fact was fully established by F. Bopp, of Berlin, in 1820, in his Analytical Comparison of Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and Germanic Languages, and by subsequent writers.} and that the culture and mythology of the ancient Hindoos were essentially analogous to that of Ancient Greece and Rome and of the Goths. The physical appearance also of the purer Hindoos, claiming to be the descendants of the highly civilized ancient Aryas, resembled generally that of the North European peoples of Britain and Scandinavia. It was then assumed that the ancient "Aryas" who civilized India and Persia or Iran, and gave them their "Aryan" speech were presumably of the same common racial stock as the ancestors of the civilizers of Greece and Rome and Northern Europe, who had in prehistoric time civilized Europe and imposed on it their "Aryan" speech. This Indo-European stock of people was thus called "The Aryan Race"; and the name "Aryan" was extended also to their several languages and dialects, which were classed as "Aryan" or "Indo-European," or by usurping German writers "Indo-Germanic." Thus the so-called "Celtic" languages were called a branch of Aryan Speech and the "Celts" themselves called "Aryans" in race; and to these "Celts" the philologists and ethnologists arbitrarily assigned the credit for first introducing the Aryan language and Aryan culture into Alban or Britain and Ireland.

Disillusionment, however, came in the year 1864, when scientific anthropologists, following Anders Retzius, the Swede, had begun to apply exact measurement to the skulls and physical types of the various so-called branches of the Aryan race, as it had been found that the shape of the skull or head-form afforded the best of all criterions of race. In that year M. Paul Broca, who had begun four years earlier a systematic measurement of the head-forms of the people of France, {P. Broca, "Sur l'ethnologie de la France" in Mémoir. Soc. d'anthropol. Paris. 1860. I, 1-56.} published his famous monograph on the head-forms of the Celts of Brittany {Broca, "Sur les Celtes" in Bullet. Soc. d'Anthropol. 1864, 457 f.; and "La Race Celtique Ancienne et Moderne Auvergnes et Amoricains, etc.," Revue d'Anthrop., 1864, 11, 577 f.} —the descendants of the original "Celts" of Cæsar and the classic writers. He found that so far from these "Celts" being of the Aryan physical type, namely tall, fair, and long-headed they were, on the contrary, a short, darkish-complexioned, and round-headed race. The next year, 1865, appeared the celebrated collection of measurements of the ethnic types in the British Isles by Davis and Thurnam in their "Crania Britannica," {J. B. Davis and J. Thurnam, 1865.} on which they had been engaged since 1860, and Dr. Beddoe's papers. {J. Beddoe, "On the head-forms of the West of England," in Mem. Anthrop. Soc., London, 1864, ii, 37 f., and 348 f.} This disclosed conclusively that the "Celtic"-speaking people of the British Isles, and more particularly the Welsh, were also short and dark-complexioned, but with long-heads or medium long-heads and thus were of a markedly different racial type to the "Celts" of Gaul; whilst their skull-form and complexion excluded the greater portion of them from the Aryan racial type and affiliated them to the Iberians.

Those startling discoveries by scientific methods excited great commotion amongst the ethnologists and philologist, as it disproved their accepted theory that the "Celts" of Gaul were of the same kindred as the "Celts" of the British Isles, and that both were Aryans; whereas it was now disclosed on the contrary that they were of different races and that neither were of the Aryan Race, although both spoke an Aryan language in different dialects.

These scientific results were fully confirmed by further measurements, which were also extended over the greater part of Europe. As these measurements disentangle the British "Celts" from the continental, and also sharply differentiate the Aryan type from both, it is necessary to glance at their leading results which are here displayed in the accompanying Table;

{This Table is based generally on that of Dr. Ripley (R.R.E., 121); but I have used Dr. Deniker's "Nordic" for No. I, with "Aryan" as its synonym, as Aryans are admittedly "Nordic," and I have rejected the ambiguous and misleading "Teutonic" which is ordinarily synonymous with "Germanic," which is a totally different type, namely No. II.}

and illustrated in Fig. 22. This

{2 "Cephalic Index" is the ratio of the extreme length of the head to its extreme breadth expressed in percentage. Under 80 the head is "Long," and 80 and upwards it is "Round" or "Broad" ("Germanic."). It is the surest criterion of race along with colour. The writer, of fair complexion, has a cephalic index of 76.1.}

{3 See note 1.}

{4 On general prevalence of "Alpine" type of head in Germany see Ripley, (R.R.E. map opp. p. 53); also Prof. Parsons, cited later.}

shows three main racial types in the population of modern Europe, all three of which we shall find represented in Britain, namely: (I) The Aryan {See note 1 on p. 134.} or Nordic (or Northern), tall, fair, broad-browed, long or longish heads, (II) Alpine or "Celtic" (continental) or Germanic, short-statured, fair or darkish, broad-browed, round or broad heads; and (III) Iberian or "Mediterranean," shortish-statured, dark, narrow-browed, long-faced, long-heads, and including the prehistoric "river-bed" type of the Picts. The best of the distinguishing criterions of race is the Head Index in second column of table, in conjunction with colour.

FIG. 22.—Three main Racial Head-Types in Europe.
(The head is viewed from above.)

A. Aryan or Nordic.
C. Alpine, or "Celtic," or Germanic (Teutonic).
B. Iberian or Mediterranean and "River-bed" type.

The first of these racial types of Europe, the Nordic or "Northern," which is the Aryan type, is now mostly restricted to north-western Europe. It included most of the classic Greeks and Romans, as evidenced by their sculptures and paintings and skeletal remains. It comprises a considerable element in the present-day population in the British Isles, the Scandinavians or Horsemen (including Swedes and many Danes), and a small proportion of the people of France and of the Rhine Valley, where, however, the skulls of the older burials show that the civilizers of Germany, like the Jutes and Anglo-Saxons, were of this type. And I shall show that the Early Britons and "Scots," properly so-called, as well as the Goths, belonged to this Aryan type, which was also the type of the eastern or Indo-Persian branch of the Aryans—the Barat-Khattiya,—and the Khatti or Hittites and Phoenicians.

The second, the "Celtic" or so-called "Alpine" [Swiss], extending from Brittany to Switzerland, also comprises the major type in the Rhine Valley, the Slav or Serb people of Mid-Europe, including the Prussians, Poles and a large proportion of the Russians, and an appreciable element amongst the people on the East Coast of Britain derived from the "Bronze Age" Hun invaders of prehistoric Alban in the later Stone Age who were essentially of this round-headed type.

{This important fact of the persistence of round-heads in the modern population of Great Britain, which is not referred to by Ripley, has been noted by many anthropologists, especially by Sir Arthur Keith in regard to both England and Scotland. Regarding the latter, Sir A. Keith has recently stated that, while the West Coast of Scotland as in the Glasgow district, contains only about 2 per cent. of round-heads in its population which is mainly long-headed like the rest of the British Isles, Edinburgh, on the East Coast, contains about 25 per cent. of round-heads in its population.}

The third type is of especial interest in regard to the "British Celtic" question, and the dark racial element by which the "Celtic" language is chiefly spoken in the British Isles. This type is generally known as "Iberian," from one of its old seats, Iberia or Spain, and it was given the wider synonym of "Pelasgic"; but it is now generally called " Mediterranean," after Sergi's nomenclature, as it is found in modern Europe, mainly along that sea-basin from Spain to Greece and its Archipelago to Asia Minor. It is essentially of the same type as the prehistoric Stone Age inhabitants of the British Isles, the "river-bed" type of Huxley, and is also substantially the same type which is found in many of the long "barrows" or long grave mounds alongside the Aryan type there.

{Dr. Thurnam's well-known axiom still holds good: "long barrow, long skull; round barrow, round head." From the South Coast and the Severn Valley—Glastonbury, Gloucester and Wilts—and northward over Britain, in the long barrows associated with the Aryan type (implying intermarriage) are found the remains of small-statured people with often long-headed and often narrow-browed skulls along with their polished stone-weapons and no bronze. See D.E.M., 318 f. On broad-browed, long-heads in long barrows, see later.}

And it still forms the substratum of the modern head-form in the British Isles. It thus appears that the titles "Hibernia" for Ireland, and "Hebrides" for the Western Isles, are probably survivals of the "Iberia" title for the primitive stock, which first peopled the British Isles in the Stone Age. Indeed, the Irish Gaels or Gaedhels or "Fene" claim origin from "the sons of Milead or Miledh," {Book of Lecain, detailed references in Skene, op. cit., 47.} which is said to be Milesia in Spain, {Ib. 319.} i.e., Iberia; and, in describing the later colonization of Erin, they say that a leading chief of the later Gaedhel Miledh immigrants was called "Eber" which appears to preserve this "Iberia" title:

"They spread themselves through Erin, to her coasts . . .

Eber (the Gaedhel) took the South of Erenn (Erin)." {Ib. 50, 51.}

In consequence of these discoveries by anthropologists that the "Celts" belonged to the non-Aryan round-headed race, and the resulting paradox that the so-called "British and Irish Celts" were not Celts, and that there were no "Celts" in Britain, {But, see below.} the leading anthropologists, recognizing the logic of facts, gave up the use of the misleading terms "Celt" and "Celtic" in a racial sense in regard to the British Isles, and restricted these terms to the round-headed Celts of Gaul, according to the designation of these people in the classics. And even the term "Aryan" tended to drop out of use in a racial sense, when no historical trace of the Early Aryans in Europe could be discovered, and when it was found by M. de Quatrefages {La race prussienne, 1871.} and others that the physical type not only of the Prussians but also the prevailing type of the Germans—who had posed as being the leading "Aryan" civilizers of Europe—was Slavic and thus Non-Aryan. They now recognized more clearly than before the fact that mere language is by itself no criterion of Race, and that kinship in language does not necessarily imply kinship in race, as so many conquered races are observed to have adopted, or to have imposed on them the language of their overlords of a totally different race. As Huxley observed, no one could call a Negro of America either English or Aryan in race, merely because he spoke the Aryan English speech. And, as has been well said: "There is no such thing as 'a French race,' but rather many races speaking French; no Italian race, but rather many races speaking Italian; no Germanic race, but rather many races speaking German;" {A. Hovelacque, Science of Language, 1877, 243.} and we may add there is no such thing as "The English race," but rather many races and mixed races living in the same political unity under the same laws and speaking the English Language.

The philologists, on the other hand, for whom the Celtic Theory seems to have possessed a fatal fascination, still clung, and do cling, to the title "Celtic" for the language spoken in the British Isles by the Gaels of Scotland and Ireland and by the Cymri of Wales. And the "die-hard" Celtists still give it a racial sense, and speak of the British "Celtic" speakers as "The Black Celts," {Compare Encyclop. Britannica, 11th ed., 1910, 5, 611.} and of the "Celtic temperament," and of the kilt as "the garb of Old Gaul," and of the "Celtic origin" of the Aryan Language in Britain. They thus keep alive the old mental confusion and mislead the public and popular writers. Thus we have the latest writer on history, Mr. Wells, misled into writing the jargon that: the Keltic invasion of Britain was by "tall and fair" people, and "Nordic Kelts," and that "it is even doubtful if the north of England is more Aryan than pre-Keltic in blood." {H. G. Wells, Outlines of History, 1920, 83.} (!) With such conflicting uses of the term "Celtic" in circulation, even some anthropologists occasionally lapse into references to "the Celts of the British Isles," and to Celts as "a branch of the Aryan Race."

Who then are the race in Britain called "Celts" by our latter day writers?

No traditional or historical reference or record whatever exists of the migration of any people called "Celts" into Early Britain.

{Cæsar mentions that some Belgians had migrated to the south coast of Britain during and shortly before his day. These have been arbitrarily called "Celts" by some latter-day writers; but Cæsar expressly excludes the Belgæ from the Celtæ (D.B.G. i, 1.).}

Anthropologists from their exact measurements of the people in Britain, tell us that "the darkest population forms the nucleus of each of the Celtic Language areas which now remain." {R.R.E., 321.} And this dark "Celtic-" speaking element is especially found in "the Grampian Hills in Scotland, the wild and mountainous Wales (and Cornwall) and the hills of Connemara and Kerry and Western Ireland." {Ib., 319.} And their average stature is relatively short, culminating in Britain, in South Wales, the Severn Valley and Cornwall. {Ib., 327-9 and map.} It will thus be noticed that this "Celtic" area corresponds generally in Scotland with the area in which the later "Picts" suddenly disappeared, and in whose place have suddenly appeared the people called "Celts." In Ireland also the "Celtic" area generally corresponds with that part of the country specially associated with the Bans, Vans or Early Feins, who, we have found, were Picts. Cornwall, with its old tin-port of Ictis (or Victis ?), was a chief "Celtic" centre on the old "Sea of Icht (or of the Picts.)" {On this "Icht" as "Pict," see later.} And the Picts appear to have called themselves "Khaldis" or "Khaltis."

This new line of evidence leads us to the conclusion that the early "Celts" or "Kelts" were presumably the early Picts calling themselves "Khaldis" or "Khaltis," a primitive people who, I find from a mass of evidence, were the early "Chaldees" or Galat(i) and "Gal(li) " of Van and Eastern Asia Minor and Mesopotamia in the Stone Age. {Details in Aryan Origins.} Their western hordes would seem to have retained their title of "Khaltis " or "Galati" or "Gal," when in the Old Stone Age they penetrated westward into Gaul on the Atlantic and formed there the primitive Kelts or Celtæ of Gaul and of Pictavia on the border of Iberia, and the Gauls and Gaul are actually called "Galatæ" and "Galat" by Strabo {S. i, 3, 21, etc.; iv, 2, 1, etc.} And at a later period when the round-headed Sarmatian Alpines invaded Gaul from the Rhine and Switzerland and drove out the Picts, they seem to have retained the old aboriginal name for that land and its people:—"Gaul" and [p. 140] "Khaltis," "Kelt" or "Celt." Yet, although in Britain the name "Kelt" or "Celt" does not appear in the fragmentary surviving history of Ancient Britain under that exact spelling, it, nevertheless, is represented in its dialectic variant of "Caled" in "Caled-on"; and in "Culdees," the title of the Pictish mission of Columba. It may possibly survive also in "Gadhel," the common Gaelic spelling of "Gael," by transposition of the letters in spelling—a recognized dialectic change called paronomasia—of an earlier "Galdhi," representing "Khaldi" or "Kaldi." And its shortened form "Gal" possibly survives in "Gael," and in "Gwalia " for Wales. So, after all, perhaps the British "Celts" are more entitled to use the "Celt" title than the round-headed "Celts" of Gaul, who, according to classic historians and anthropologists, are the only true "Celts."

This identity of the ancestors of the "British Celts" or "Kelts" with the "Khaldis" or "Caleds" or Picts is in keeping with the physical traits and head-form of the latter. The people of the "Celtic-" speaking areas are preponderatingly of the dark, long, narrow-headed, narrow-faced, smaller-statured Iberian type of the Khaldis or Picts; and this is also the prevailing type of the substratum of the people throughout the British Isles.

{Thus Dr. Beddoe describes the "Celtic area" race in Scotland: "The head and face are long, and rather narrow, the skull base rather narrow, the brow and occiput prominent." Hair mostly "dark brown" to "brownish black" and even "coal-black" (B.R.B., 245). Hector Maclean records, "the head is high, long and often narrow, the face frequently long . . . . the lips are usually full, often thick, and more or less projecting " (A.R., iv, 129). Ripley, on the commonest type in the British Isles generally, says: "The prevailing type is that of a long, narrow cranium, accompanied by an oval rather than a broad or round, face " (R.R.E., 303). And Wilson, on the British "Celts," notes "the remarkable narrowness of forehead which characterizes the Celtic Race [in the British Isles]." (W.P.A., 181). And he also says: "We begin to discover that the Northern and Southern Picts were no other than the aboriginal Celtæ," (Ib. 15); although he confounds the issues by supposing that the dark Picts were Aryans.}

The modern "British Celts," however, as well as the bulk of their kindred still forming the main substratum in the population of the British Isles generally, have become a somewhat heterogeneous race, through more or less intermixture with the other two races of later invaders and civilizers. Thus their original dark aboriginal Pictish or Iberian stock has been mixed more or less on the East Coast and Midlands with the non-Aryan round-headed and broad-browed, fair "Alpine" or Slav or "Hun" invaders from the time of the beaker-using men of the Late Stone Age, about 2000 B.C. onwards;

{These round-head "beaker" men, as found in Aberdeen stone cists, were of small stature, averaging 5 feet 4 inches, with broad, short faces and widish noses and muscular build, T.B.B. 69. But in the South, on the East Coast of England, they averaged 5 feet 8-9 inches, with cranial index of 80 to 84, with broad brows and roundish faces. A. Keith, J.R.A.I., 1915.}

and later over all the British Isles, they have been mixed more or less with their Aryan rulers and civilizers, the tall, long-headed, broad-browed, fair "Northern" invaders, the Britons and Scots, properly so-called, with their later kindred Anglo-Saxons, Norse and Normans. As a result of this partial intermixing during many centuries (which is discussed in a later chapter on the mixing of the races) there have arisen several intermediate composite types. Many of the "British Celts" thus now possess a considerable strain of Aryan blood, manifesting itself in physical traits and especially in a lighter colour of the hair and eyes, whilst fondly idealizing their Celtic ancestry into a sentimental cult. But the major portion of the population, not only in the modern "Celtic" areas, but all over the British Isles generally retains appreciably a preponderating Pictish type.

Thus, in regard to the civilization of the British Isles, we find that the modern theory that it was the "British Celts" who first introduced the Aryan language and civilization into Britain is merely a survival of an unfounded assumption by later philologists, which assumption rested on the further unfounded assumption that the "British Celts" were originally Aryans in Race.

We are now in a position to take up, on much clearer ground than has hitherto been possible for previous enquirers, the great and hitherto unsolved question as to how and when the Aryan language and civilization were first introduced into Britain, and by what racial agency.