HISTORY OF ENGLAND.


CHAPTER I.


The remotest fact in the history of England is written in her rocks.
Geology tells us of a time when no sea flowed between Dover and Calais,
while an unbroken continent extended from the Mediterranean to the
Orkneys.

Huge mounds of rough stones called Cromlechs, have yielded up still
another secret. Before the coming of the Keltic-Aryans, there dwelt
there two successive races, whose story is briefly told in a few human
fragments found in these "Cromlechs." These remains do not bear the
royal marks of Aryan origin. The men were small in stature, with
inferior skulls; and it is surmised that they belonged to the same
mysterious branch of the human family as the Basques and Iberians,
whose presence in Southern Europe has never been explained.

When the Aryan came and blotted out these races will perhaps always
remain an unanswered question. But while Greece was clothing herself
with a mantle of beauty, which the world for two thousand years has
striven in vain to imitate, there was lying off the North and West
coasts of the European Continent a group of mist-enshrouded islands of
which she had never heard.