Note 1512 — THE ETHNOLOGY OF ANCIENT BRITAIN

A few years ago Professor Macalister (Journ. Anthr. Inst., xxiii, 1894, pp. 407-8) propounded a set of questions which, he suggested, might be answered by the help of an ‘ethnographic census’:—‘Have we’, he asked, ‘any representatives of the pre-Celtic inhabitants? ... if so, are such people of a pre-Aryan stock, and are they of the same type as the long-headed people in the long barrows? ... Are these the Silures? ... Were the Celtic immigrants homogeneous? ... What relation subsisted between the Cymric and Gaidhelic-speaking peoples?’ &c. It will be apparent to any one who reads this article that most of these questions can be answered without the aid of an ‘ethnographic census’; and that, if they could not be answered independently, such aid would be insufficient unless it could be supplemented by new archaeological and linguistic information. The unofficial census which has been carried out by Dr. Beddoe, M. H. Muffang, Sir William Turner, and, perhaps in consequence of Professor Macalister’s suggestion, by Dr. C. R. Browne, Messrs. Gray and Tocher, and other anthropologists, is of course incomplete; but it may be doubted whether the evidence which they have collected would be seriously modified by further investigation. When Dr. Collignon undertook a similar informal census in France, he compared in each department the mean cephalic index of the whole number of the heads which he had measured with that of the ten which he had measured first; and in every instance the difference was less than 1 per cent. (Rice Holmes, Caesar’s Conquest of Gaul, 1899, p. 320).