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Chap. IX. possessed any or that those in the rest of Europe are very much more modern. If the northern dolmens are only one thousand to two thousand years old, the matter is easily explained. If they are three thousand or four thousand years old, they ought also to be found in Italy.

The fact seems to be that both the Pelasgi of Greece and the Tyrrheni of Italy came in contact either with Egypt or some early stone-hewing people before they left their homes in the East to migrate into Europe, and that they never passed through the rude-stone stage of architecture at any period, or at any place with which we are acquainted; and as they were, so far as we know, the earliest colonists of the countries they afterwards occupied, it seems in vain to look for dolmens where they settled. If Attila had lived five centuries before instead of after the Christian era, he and his Huns might have produced a rude-stone age in Italy. The inhabitants of Etruria were essentially a burying, dead-reverencing people, and if they had only been thrown back to that stage of barbarism which the rude monuments of our forefathers represent, we might have found dolmens there in thousands. The fate of Italy was different. Pressed by the Celts of Gallia Cisalpina in the north and by the Romans in the south, Etruria was squeezed out of existence, but by two races more civilized and progressive than herself. So far from throwing her back towards barbarism, Rome in adopting many of her forms advanced and improved upon them, and imparted to her architecture a higher and more intellectual form than she had been herself able to impress upon it. So, too, in Greece. The Dorian superseded and extinguished the Pelasgic forms, but after a longer interval of time. Four or five centuries elapsed between the last tomb we know of, at Mycenæ, and the earliest Doric temple at Corinth, and the consequence is that we see far fewer traces of the earlier people in the architecture of Greece than we do in that of Rome. But in neither instance was there any tendency to retrogade to a dolmen stage of civilization.

The case was widely different with such countries as Spain or France. There an aboriginal population had existed for thousands and tens of thousands of years, unprogressive and incapable, so far as we know, of progress within themselves, and only at last