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Where human annals see only the handicraft and interaction of human beings Euskarian and Aryan, Celt and Roman, Englishman and Norman a closer scrutiny of history may perhaps see the working of still deeper elements chalk and clay, volcanic upheaval and glacial denudation, barren upland and forest-clad plain.

But it is important to remark that it is a language the area of which has gradually diminished without any corresponding extirpation of the people who primitively spoke it; so that the people of Spain and of Aquitaine at the present day must be largely "Euskarian" by descent in just the same sense as the Cornish men are "Celtic" by descent.

The Euskarian neolithic population of Britain a dark white race, like the modern Basques had settlements in Sussex, at least in the coast district between the Downs and the sea.

Freeman admits, were probably spared in large numbers. Even of the men, many doubtless became slaves to the Saxon lords; while others maintained themselves in isolated bands in the Weald. To this day the Euskarian type of humanity is not uncommon among the Sussex peasantry, and all the rivers still bear the Celtic names of Arun, Adur, Ouse, and Calder.

Silent and collected, they glided on the funereal pavement of mortuary slabs, where one could read still, in spite of the effacing of ages, inscriptions in Euskarian tongue, names of extinguished families and dates of past centuries. Gracieuse, whose coming preoccupied Ramuntcho, was late.

To this day, people of mixed Euskarian parentage, and marked by the long skull, dark complexion, and black eyes of the Euskarian type, form a large proportion of the English peasantry; and they are found even in Sussex, which subsequently suffered more than most other parts of Britain from the destructive deluge of Teutonic barbarism in the fifth century.

Their superior weapons gave them at once an enormous advantage over the Euskarian natives, armed only with their polished flint hatchets, and before long they overran the whole island, save only the recesses of Wales and the north of Scotland. From that moment, the bronze age of Britain set in say some 1,000 or 1,500 years before the Christian era.

The non-Aryan language here referred to is the Euskarian, now spoken only by the Basques, but which seems in earlier times to have been the language of the Aquitanians and Spaniards, and may possibly have extended much further to the East. Whether it has any connection with the Ligurian and Oscan dialects are questions upon which, of course, I do not presume to offer any opinion.

The evidence of tumuli and weapons goes to show that the Euskarian people of Sussex occupied the coast belt and the combes of the Downs from the Chichester marshland to Pevensey, but that they did not spread at all into the Weald.

In Western Europe, it has left a fragment of the primary Euskarian in one corner of the country, and a fragment of the secondary Celtic in another. In the British islands, only outlying pools of the secondary linguistic wave remain in Wales, the Highlands, Ireland, and the Isle of Man.