ANCIENT RACES IN IRELAND.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume II, Issue 85, 12 December 1874, Page 11

ANCIENT RACES IN IRELAND.

++ In the session of the British Association of Aug. 22, before the Anthropological Department of the Biological Section, the President, Sir W. E. Wylde, M.D., delivered an address on " The Eaces of Mankind in Ireland ; Their Eemains and Present Eepresentatives." He said that anthropology, the science of man, so-called, his origin, age, and distribution on our globe, his physical conformation, and susceptibility" of cultivation in various forms of speech, his laws, habits, manners, customs, weapons and tools ; his archaic markings, aB also his pictorial remains, his tombs, his ideographic and phonetic or alphabetic writing down to his present culture in different countries, and his manufactories, arts, and degrees of intelligence, in his different phases of life throughout the world, were all presented for investigation "by that section of the association. Mr Gladstone, in his critical review of Homer's place in history, alluded to the fact that of a number of implements and utensils found by Gen. Cenola in Cyprus, exhibiting so extensive a use of uncombined copper, and so clear and wide application of that metal to cutting purposes as a.t .once to suggest a modification of the theories of those who, in arranging what may be termed their metallic periods, assumed that the age of bronze came in immediate succession to the age of stone ; and again, Mr Gladstone wrote, that the excavations, according to our present information present to us copper as the staple material for the implements, utensils, and of the weapons (so far as they were metallic) of the inhabitants of Troy. No bettor authority could be adduced on the latter subject ; but if Mr Gladstone had inspected the. great collection of antique metal work in the National Museum of the Eoyal Irish Academy before it was disarranged, he would have seen that copper weapons, tools and implements were the forerunners of the mixed metal, bronze, or brass, in Ireland. He had little doubt that the skin-clad man, with his stone, bone and wooden weapons and tools, his shell ornaments, and rude enlarged pottery, the primitive nomad hunter and fisher, arrived in Ireland and occupied its plains, forests, and vastness. He thought that reindeer and the elephant, anl propably the musk ox, had become extinct before man's arrival in Erin, and had always inclined to the idea that he was not contemporaneous

■with that great monarch of the nervine race, the Irish elk. H e had little doubt as to the question whether these or subsequent races were the men who erected the lacnstrine habitations required a further investigation. The Irish annals were first committed to writing by the Christian scribes, in either Gaelic or Lathi, and were not only intermixed : with classic story, "but with eeriptual incidents, particularly those relating to the dispersion of mankind after the deluge. It wrs argued that the aborigines of Ireland, had been conquered by Greek invaders, and with them and other nationalities — as the Spanish and Danish— the Celtic race had been intermingled. The great advantages Ireland had derived from this intermixture of races -were pointed out, and Sir W. "Wylde concluded by a reference to the people of Ulster, who had three great characteristics.