Page:A School History of England (1911).djvu/14

 

  is to be a short history of all the people who have lived in the British Islands. I have just counted up over a hundred of these islands on the map, some of them mere rocks, some as big as small counties; besides England with Scotland, and Ireland. But when first there were men in Britain it was not a group of islands, but one stretch of land joining the great continent of Europe, which then reached out into the Atlantic Ocean more than fifty miles west of Ireland. The English Channel, the North Sea and the Irish Sea were then land through which ran huge European rivers. The land was covered with forests and swamps, and full of wild beasts, some of which have now vanished from the earth, while others, such as the tiger and the elephant, have gone to warmer climates. As for wolves, the land was alive with them. Indeed, the last wolf in Scotland was killed only 240 years ago; the last in Ireland about 180 years ago. The beaver was one of the commonest animals of those early times, and perhaps helped to make our flat meadows by the dams he built across the streams. But we know almost nothing about the first men who lived here, except that they were naked and very hairy;