towns in their countries, and it has even been ascertained that, in certain districts, they coined money. Since it was their custom mostly to burn the bodies of their dead, and inter them in Barrows, it is clear that the Celts must have been a totally different people from the inhabitants in the stone-period, who interred their corpses unburnt in Cromlechs, and used mere simple implements of stone and bone. It may certainly well be imagined that the Celts originally existed in a lower state of civilization, and that by degrees they acquired a knowledge of the use of metals, and thereby the opportunity for greater improvement. It must here, however, be remembered that the Celts, at the period when they are first mentioned in history, spread themselves from Italy through the west of Europe (or Gaul), to England (Britain.) Thus they possessed about the same countries in which the Cromlechs occur. At that time, however, they had been driven by the German races towards the west. In previous times they had undoubtedly occupied a much greater extent of the present country of Germany, particularly its middle and southern parts, where the names of localities, mountains, and rivers, are very frequently of Celtic origin; in which regions, however, the characteristic Cromlechs with unburnt bodies, instruments of flint, and ornaments of amber, have not as yet been found. Had Cromlechs of this nature been the most ancient Celtic graves, we should certainly have expected to have found them in the countries first inhabited by the Celts. But, what is more, in the west of Europe there appears not to have been any transition from the Cromlech to the Barrow; they are totally different.
According to all probability we must, on the contrary, assume that the people who inhabited Denmark during the stone-period, and who, as we learn from the remaining memorials of ancient times, diffused themselves over the coasts of the north of Germany, and the west of Europe, as well as in England and Ireland, were not of Celtic origin; but that on the contrary they belonged to an older and still unknown
