nia of the present Laps. But hitherto so few skulls from Cromlechs have been preserved, that it is scarcely possible to found any argument upon them; though it seems that the skulls, which have as yet been excavated, so far from being of the same type, are so different, that a physiologist declared some of them to be of Caucasian origin. It is not sufficient to attribute this difference to an effect of the difference of climate, and the altered mode of living adopted by the Fins, when they went from the south to the north of Scandinavia, because this is only an hypothesis, which, as has already been shewn, is far from tenable. It is therefore not improbable that, thousands of years ago, a nomadic race connected with the Fins, whose existence it is, at this moment, impossible either entirely to deny, or to establish satisfactorily, may have wandered about Denmark; while this much is certain, that the inhabitants of Denmark during the stone-period cannot have been the Fins, whose descendants are the present inhabitants of Lapland.
From a conviction of this fact, other writers have argued that the Fins have formed the basis of the earliest population in Sweden and Norway only, but that the Celts were the most ancient inhabitants of Denmark. This view, at the first glance, seems a highly probable one, since it is known that the Cromlechs and antiquities of the stone-period occur on the coasts of the whole of the west of Europe, as well as in countries, which were certainly inhabited by the Celts from the earliest times. But in these countries there also exist Barrows, which exhibit a striking similarity to the Danish Barrows of the bronze-period. We might therefore with equal right maintain that such Barrows were constructed by the Celts, since they occur in countries which are known to have been inhabited at a very early period by that people. It is impossible to form any conclusions, in this respect, from the Barrows. The Celts, however, according to all historical records, were early distinguished by a certain degree of civilization; they possessed weapons and ornaments of metal, there were regular
