believe that the men of old were actively seeking for the earthly paradise where existed "givers of life" that could confer all sorts of benefits on man. We know further that these givers of life, gold, precious stones, pearls, plants, actually exist in many parts of the world. If men were seeking for them, they must in certain cases have found them. So it is legitimate to examine the early settlements of civilised men in various parts of the world to see if there be any signs that they were determined in their movements by the desire to obtain possession of givers of life. To begin with the first example that was mentioned, that of Ireland. The Celts imagined that there was an earthly paradise over the seas that was full of wealth. But what was the place where they had settled, Ireland itself, but a region that must in early times have been full of givers of life in the shape of gold, pearls, and other substances? Although the matter is not yet capable of exact proof, there is good reason to believe that the first civilised people who arrived there, the kitchen-midden people and the dolmen-builders, were seeking for gold and pearls as well as other substances.[1] They settled also in Devon and
- ↑ Mr. J. Wilfrid Jackson of the Manchester Museum, Hon. Sec. of the Conchological Society, tells me that the distribution of the kitchen-middens of Ireland agrees well with that of the pearl mussel. If on the map of dolmens given by Borlase in the first volume of his Dolmens of Ireland be plotted the distribution of kitchen-middens, it will be found that, of the 56 middens recorded in the 1914 volume of the Proceedings of the Royal Irish Institute of Antiquaries, only six are more than five miles distant from a dolmen, and as many as 29 of them are within one mile of a dolmen. Moreover, as Mr. Robert Standen of the Manchester Museum has shown, the kitchen-midden people of Dogs' Bay, Connemara, were engaged in extracting purple, hardly an occupation of degraded savages. If on the same map be plotted the distribution of pearl-bearing mussels, as well as gold, silver, lead and copper, and flint, which the dolmen-builders and kitchen-midden peoples used for their implements, it will be seen that there is a close correspondence between the distributions. I propose shortly to lay before the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society the results of an examination into the distribution of megalithic monuments, which will go to show that the earliest civilised peoples were attracted thither by the gold
