islands—a few slight and scattered notices by the Greek and Latin writers, and an occasional passage in the Welsh Triads, form the meagre total of our information[1]. Mere speculations, however ingenious, it would be foreign to the plan of this work to entertain: however interesting, or even convincing, to the student of antiquity, they are too shadowy to be grasped and retained by the unlearned reader. From the positive evidence, however, of such weapons and ornaments as have been from time to time discovered in this country, and acknowledged as neither of Roman nor Saxon workmanship, we are, with the aid of the scanty testimony before-mentioned, authorized to presume that its earliest inhabitants had relapsed into barbarism, as they receded from the civilized south, and having lost, in the course of their migrations, the art of working metals and of weaving cloth, were clothed in skins, decorated with beads and flowers, and armed with weapons of bone and flint, which, in addition to their stained and punctured bodies (the remembrance, it would appear from Herodotus, of a Thracian custom[2]), must have given them, as nearly as possible, the appearance of the Islanders of the South Pacific, as described by Captain Cook.
And with similar policy to that practised by our famous navigator, did the Tyrian traders apparently teach the British savages to manufacture swords, spear-blades, and arrow-heads, from a composition
- ↑ Herodotus, book iv. ; Plutarch in Mario; Welsh Triads. 4 and 5.
- ↑ Herodotus, v. 6. "To have punctures on their skin is with them a mark of nobility, to be without these is a testimony of mean descent." Isidorus describes the British method of tatooing in these words : "They squeeze the juice of certain herbs into figures made on their bodies with the points of needles." Orig, lib. xix. c. 23. It seems to have been done in infancy, as Pliny tells us the British wives and nurses did it. Nat. Hist lib. xxii. c..2.
