Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/469

] without a break in those regions down to the present day. The Iron age is divided by the Scandinavian archæologists into three divisions; the first of which extends as far down, according to Worsaae, as A.D. 450, and is characterised by the abundant proof of the influence of the Roman Empire of the West engrafted upon the low German culture; the second is marked by the palpable traces of the influence of the Roman Empire of the East, radiating from Constantinople; and the third, ranging from A.D. 700 to 1000, is known as the period of the Vikings. The history of Scandinavia may be said to date from the second of these, although from time to time a ray of light is thrown upon its previous condition in the records of other countries. In the middle of the first of these periods the corsairs issuing from the Baltic and the ports to the west of the Cimbric Chersonese harried the coast of Britain and Gaul to such an extent in the third century, that they could scarcely be kept in check by the organisation of a Roman fleet, and thus prepared the way for the conquest by which the Roman Britannia became England. The long ships which composed their fleets were merely modifications of those which are figured in p. 394, from the rocks in Sweden engraved in the Bronze age. We have also representations of boats of the Iron age. In Fig. 165 I have reproduced a sketch incised on a rock at Häggeby in Uplande, representing a boat with twelve pairs of oars, in which the prow and the stern are formed in the same way. A boat of this kind has been discovered in