‘These,’ the professor warns us, perhaps superfluously, ‘are conjectures which I cannot establish; but possibly somebody else may.’
I venture to hint a doubt. Not only is the derivation of _Coritani_ utterly uncertain,[1611] but it is safe to assume that the Celtic tribe who undoubtedly conquered the country which belonged in Ptolemy’s time to the Coritani would not have called its population, themselves included, by a name which described not even the people whom they found in possession, but the ‘slaves and drudges’ of that people, or rather of their neolithic predecessors! The professor indeed argued in _Celtic Folk-Lore_[1612] that the Coritanian dwarfs ‘may be conjectured to have had quiet from invaders from the Continent because of the inaccessible nature of their fens’. How then did they themselves and the non-dwarfish invaders of the Bronze Age get there? It is almost superfluous to remark that in the year before and in the year after the publication of _Celtic Folk-Lore_ the professor counted the Coritani among the Brythonic ‘invaders from the Continent’.[1613] The ‘mound-dwellings’ which Mr. MacRitchie describes[1614] belong to the class of structures which are popularly known as ‘Picts’ houses’, ‘Earth-houses’, or ‘Weems’, and are immeasurably later than the period to which Professor Rhys’s theory would compel him to assign them. The mere fact, indeed, that many of them have been shown by excavation to have been occupied in Roman times does not prove that they were not constructed earlier; but I can find no evidence that any of them belong even to the Neolithic Age. Mr. MacRitchie himself assures us that one which was opened at Crichton in Mid-Lothian ‘was proved to have been built not earlier than 80 A.D.’;[1615] and he assigns the ‘mound-dwellings’ in general not to a pre-neolithic race but to the Picts of historic times.[1616] He also says that one which was explored in 1855 contained four chambers, of which the largest was ‘6 feet 2 inches long, 4 feet 6 inches in height, and 2 feet 6 inches wide’, and, with a fascinating lack of humour, he adds that ‘while the size of the stones used in its construction is evidence of great personal strength on the part of the builders, the small and narrow rooms seem to indicate a diminutive race.’[1617] When the reader is invited to believe that ‘those who inhabited’ these ‘rooms’, which were only built by the exertion of ‘great personal strength’, ‘were of remarkably short stature’, he falls to calculating whether even a race of Tom Thumbs, each of whom possessed the muscular power of a Sandow, would not have used their strength to make their rooms a little more comfortable.[1618] Mr. MacRitchie shows more acumen when, after remarking that ‘two alleged Fairy Knowes in Shetland’ proved on investigation to be natural hillocks, and that another in Stirlingshire ‘was only a sepulchral mound’, he concludes that these instances are ‘sufficient to show the unreliable nature of popular tradition’.[1619] If it was ‘the Celt’s faculty of exaggeration’ that ‘enabled him to bequeath to the great literatures of Western Europe a motley train of dwarfs’, why should he not have exercised his faculty upon the comparatively short neolithic population rather than upon the imaginary pygmies whom Professor Rhys has appointed as their ‘slaves and drudges’?[1620] And if the imagination which created ‘a motley train of dwarfs’ had pygmies for its basis of fact, will the professor tell us who were the originals of the ‘motley train’ of giants whom the imaginations of various European peoples associated with the dwarfs?[1621] I am aware that Professor Kollmann[1622] claims to have proved that pygmies existed in prehistoric times in France, Germany, Switzerland, and other European countries; but the fact remains that no evidence has been produced that a race of pre-neolithic or even prehistoric pygmies existed in this country save only that which is furnished by ‘the Celt’s faculty of exaggeration’.