Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/350

322 positions as in Gaul. Just as the Celts pushed back the Iberian population of Gaul as far south as Aquitania, and swept round it into Spain, so they crossed the Channel and overran the greater portion of Britain, until the Silures, identified by Tacitus with the Iberians, were left only in those fastnesses which were subsequently a refuge for the Welsh against the English invaders. And just as the Belgæ pressed on the rear of the Celts as far as the Seine, so they followed them ultimately into Britain, and took possession of the Pars Maritima or southern counties. The unsettled condition of the country at the time of Cæsar's invasion was due to the struggle then going on. The Iberian populatian by that time had been driven as far as they could go to the west, not only in Spain and in Gaul, but also in Britain, and were restricted to those areas in which the ethnologist can trace their blood in the present population. Since that time, however, they must have been profoundly affected by the invasions of the various Germanic tribes, who settled in their land, and forced back upon them the Celtic and Belgic peoples, ever pressing them to the west.

Before the Celtic invasion Gaul was inhabited by other tribes than the Iberian. The Ligures dwelt in the district round Marseilles, and held the region between the river Po and the Gulf of Genoa to the western boundary of Etruria, and they extended along the coast of the Mediterranean as far as the Pyrenees, that is to say, over the area included under the name of Iberia in