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the antiquities of Rome, Greece, and Egypt have been carefully examined and systematically described by English writers, the primeval national antiquities of the British islands have never hitherto been brought into a scientific arrangement. The consequence has been that they have neither furnished those results to history, nor excited that interest with the public in general, which they otherwise would have done. This want of systematic arrangement has probably arisen from the circumstance that on the British islands there exist remains of many different people, as the Celts, the Romans, the Saxons, the North-men and the Normans. It is often difficult to distinguish with certainty the antiquities of those different people, and hence the same remains have, by some authors, been called Celtic or Druidical, by others Roman, by others again Danish, &c.

In order to determine with any degree of certainty the differences between the antiquities of different people, and particularly in order to determine what remains are not Roman, it will evidently be serviceable to British antiquaries to look to the national antiquities of countries that were never conquered by the Romans, and whose national remains are