overlooking a ravine, rises an artificial terrace, twenty-one paces in length by ten in breadth, supported by slabs and masses of stone.

'Along the western side of this platform, I found a row of those remarkable relics of antiquity, belonging essentially to the Druidical religion, called Cromlechs.

"There are twelve still standing,—ten on the side of the terrace, and two in the centre of it. The ruins of several others are apparent. Most of the entire ones consist of three upright slabs planted firmly in the earth, and supporting a fourth, which is passed horizontally on the top of them. Four of the Cromlechs are larger than the rest, being about four feet square and five high, the length of the upper slab measuring seven feet. Inquiring of the people what they knew respecting these remarkable structures, I was told, with much gravity, that they had been constructed by a race of men, not a foot high, who existed before mankind were destroyed by a flood which overwhelmed the earth. An account remarkable as manifesting the universal belief in fairies; and important as exhibiting a tradition of the deluge among the lower orders of the Hindoo peasantry, who cannot have access to the Brahminical accounts of the cataclysm.

"It is very remarkable that not only are the Cromlechs of the Neilgherries fac-similes of those in Europe, but that the same legend is attached to both.

"The one perhaps best known is called Kits Cotty House, near Aylesford in Kent, and consists of three flat stones containing a fourth. A drawing of this Cromlech in my possession is an exact representation of one of the most conspicuous at Alcheny on the Neilgherries.'

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The singular and very interesting connection once subsisting between the pure Arian and the Celto-Arian races has been thus stated by the learned Pictet, in a profound and

1 Capt. H. Congreve, Madras Journal, 1847.

critical treatise which has stamped his authority with the highest authority :—

"I here terminate," he thus writes, "this parallel of the Celtic idioms with the Sanscrit. I do not believe that after this marked series of analogies, a series which embraces the entire organization of their tongues, that their radical affinity can be contested.

"The Celtic languages belong, then, to the Indo-European family, of which they form the extreme western link.

"The Celtic race established in Europe from the most ancient times must have been the first to arrive there, and, in all probability, it separated from the common stock before the rest. The decisive analogies which these languages still present to the Sanscrit carry us back to the most ancient period to which we can attain by comparative philology, and thus become one of the most important bases to investigate what degree of development the mother language of the whole family has attained." Hence it is not a little singular, that although the most brilliant philological discoveries of our day have distinctly proved the affiliated descent of the Hellenic, Sclavonian, Celtic, German, and Gothic dialects from the Sanscrit type of speech;—the speakers of these dialects have been overlooked as the ancient brethren of the Greeks, who themselves, as before noticed, spoke a branch of this mighty and wide-spread language.

1 Lettres à M. Humboldt. Jour. Asiatique, 1836, p. 455.

LONDON, August, 1855.

INTRODUCTION.

Were an Englishman to sit down, purposing to write the history of his native country previous to the Norman conquest to sketch the outlines of the Anglo-Saxon constitution, laws, and customs; were he to speak confidently of the old Saxon kings; their attendants, military and civil; to unfold the origin of their people, the structure of their language, and their primitive settlements; it would not be too much to expect that he should have some knowledge of the Saxon tongue.

And yet, what must he said of the confidence of the antiquarians of Greece, who, though themselves Hellenes, have, with a profound ignorance of the early language of Pelasgian Hellas, turned twilight into darkness, by absurd attempts to derive the words and customs of remote antiquity from the Greek language—a language at that period not in existence? But this vain-glorious confidence is not the only thing for which they are answerable. They have thereby unwittingly originated a gigantic system of absurdities and a tissue of tales, the opprobrium of history, and the torment of the inquiring mind. We feel that all this mass of error has a foundation in positive fact; we feel that agency, the most vital, the most energetic, the most constant, is at work; mighty actors come and go upon the scene, and mighty changes take place. And

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yet we are called upon by Theorisers to renounce the instincts of our nature; to class the siege of Troy, the Argonautic expedition, the history of Heracles, the history of Theseus—nay, the whole busy, crowded scene of early Hellas, with the product of mythopoeic propensities, and secretions from the fancy. Alas! for this dream! I shall prove incontrovertibly, not only that such things were distorted facts, but I shall demonstrate that the Centaurs were not mythical1—that the Athenian claim to the symbol of the Grasshopper was not mythical—that the Autochthons were not mythical—that the serpent Pytho was not mythical—that Cadmus and the dragon's teeth were not mythical—that Zeus was not mythical—that Apollo was not mythical—that the Pierian Muses were not mythical—that Cecrops was neither legendary nor mythical; but as historical as King Harold. And this I purpose to effect, not by any rationalising process, but by the very unpoetical evidences of latitude and longitude, which will certainly not be deemed of a legendary nature.

I would here repeat a remark made on another occasion' on the historical basis of mythology. Perhaps within the whole compass of mythology there is no system altogether more plausible than the Grecian. Its coherence betrays art in arrangement, but weakness in the main incidents. A basis, however, it undoubtedly possessed, which was neither of an inventive nor fictitious character. What that basis was, is certainly not to be eliminated from either poet or logographer, or historian, independent of extraneous aids. Such aids are presented to the inquiring mind in those two most durable records of a nation,—its language and its monuments. These adjuncts, though of foreign origin, are,

I use this term here, as synonymous with "invention, having no historical basis."

2 See my "Greek Mythology," in vol. i. of the "History of Greece," in the "Encyclopædia Metropolitana," 1851.