within the sphere of Roman influence. It is with Julius Caesar, that
great writer (and yet greater maker) of History, that, for us, this
record commences.

A. 4.--But before dealing with "Britain's tale" as connected with
"Caesar's fate," it will be well to note briefly what earlier
information ancient documents and remains can afford us with regard
to our island and its inhabitants. With the earliest dwellers upon its
soil of whom traces remain we are, indeed, scarcely concerned. For in
the far-off days of the "River-bed" men (five thousand or five hundred
thousand years ago, according as we accept the physicist's or the
geologist's estimate of the age of our planet) Britain was not yet an
island. Neither the Channel nor the North Sea as yet cut it off from
the Continent when those primaeval savages herded beside the banks of
its streams, along with elephant and hippopotamus, bison and elk, bear
and hyaena; amid whose remains we find their roughly-chipped flint
axes and arrow-heads, the fire-marked stones which they used in
boiling their water, and the sawn or broken bases of the antlers
which for some unknown purpose[6] they were in the habit of cutting
up--perhaps, like the Lapps of to-day, to anchor their sledges withal
in the snow. For the great Glacial Epoch, which had covered half the
Northern Hemisphere with its mighty ice-sheet, was still, in their
day, lingering on, and their environment was probably that of Northern
Siberia to-day. Some archaeologists, indeed, hold that they are to
this day represented by the Esquimaux races; but this theory cannot be
considered in any way proved.

A. 5.--Whether, indeed, they were "men" at all, in any real sense
of the word, may well be questioned. For of the many attempts which
philosophers in all ages have made to define the word "man," the only