Like other world-rivers, the Rhine has attracted to its banks a
succession of races of widely divergent origin. Celt, Teuton, Slav, and
Roman have contested for the territories which it waters, and if the
most enduring of these races has finally achieved dominion over the
fairest river-province in Europe, who shall say that it has emerged from
the struggle as a homogeneous people, having absorbed none of the blood
of those with whom it strove for the lordship of this vine-clad valley?
He would indeed be a courageous ethnologist who would suggest a purely
Germanic origin for the Rhine race. As the historical period dawns upon
Middle Europe we find the Rhine basin in the possession of a people of
Celtic blood. As in Britain and France, this folk has left its indelible
mark upon the countryside in a wealth of place-names embodying its
characteristic titles for flood, village, and hill. In such prefixes and
terminations as magh, brig, dun, and etc we espy the influence of Celtic
occupants, and Maguntiacum, or Mainz, and Borbetomagus, or Worms, are
examples of that ‘Gallic’ idiom which has indelibly starred the map of
Western Europe.

Prehistoric Miners

The remains of this people which are unearthed from beneath the
superincumbent strata of their Teutonic successors in the country show
them to have been typical of their race. Like their kindred in Britain,
they had successfully exploited the mineral treasures of the country,
and their skill as miners is eloquently upheld by the mute witness of
age-old cinder-heaps by which are found the once busy bronze hammer and
the apparatus of the smelting-furnace, speaking of the slow but steady
smith-toil upon which the foundation of civilization arose. There was
scarcely a mineral beneath the loamy soil which masked the metalliferous