ledge of geography to know exactly whither to go, but at the same time possessed with such a spirit of wandering that so soon as they settled for a certain time in a given place, and buried a certain number of their chiefs, they immediately set out again on their travels. According to this view, they were so weak that they fled the moment when the original possessors of the land rose against them, though, strange to say, they had in the first instance been able to dispossess them. What is still more unlikely is that they should have possessed the organization to keep together, and to introduce everywhere their own arts and their own customs, but that, when they departed, they should have left nothing but their tombs behind. This hypothesis involves in fact so many difficulties and so many improbabilities that I do not think that either M. Bertrand or the Baron de Bonstetten would now, that our knowledge is so much increased, adhere to it. I at least cannot see on what grounds it can be maintained. It is so diametrically opposed to all we know of ancient migrations. They seem always—in so far as Europe is concerned—to have followed the course of the sun from east to west; and the idea that a people, after having peopled Britain, should have started again to land on the rugged coasts of the Asturias or in Portugal, and not have been able to penetrate into the interior, is so very unlikely that it would require very strong and direct testimony to make it credible, while it need hardly be said no such evidence is forthcoming.
The hypothesis which seems to account much more satisfactorily for the facts as we know them assumes that an ancestral worshipping people inhabited the Spanish peninsula from remote prehistoric times. If so, they certainly occupied the pastoral plains of Castile and the fertile regions of Valencia and Andalusia, as well as the bleak hills of Gallicia and the Asturias. Whether we call them Iberians, or Celtiberians, or, to use a more general term, Turanians, they were a dead-reverencing, ancestral worshipping people, but had not in prehistoric times learnt to use stone for the adornment of their tombs.
The first people, so far as we know, who disturbed the Iberians in their possessions were the Carthaginians. They occupied the sea coast at least of Murcia and Valencia, and if, according to their custom, they sought to reduce the natives to slavery, they
