In Ireland we find this tall, dark race over all the west of the island, but most numerous in Kerry, Clare, Galway and Mayo; in those regions where, we know, the older population was least disturbed.  In remote villages among the mountains, reached by bridle-paths between heath-covered hills; in the settlements of fishermen, under some cliff or in the sheltered nook of one of our great western bays; or among the lonely, little visited Atlantic islands, this dark, handsome race, with its black hair, dark-brown eyes, sallow skin and high forehead, still holds its own, as a second layer above the remnant of the far more ancient Firbolg Hyperboreans.  We find the same race also among the Donegal highlands, here and there in the central plain or in the south, and nowhere entirely missing among the varied races towards the eastern sea.

[Illustration:  Sugar Loaf Mountain, Glengarriff.]

But it is by no means in Ireland only that this tall, dark, western race is found.  It is numerously represented in the nearest extension of the continent, among the headlands and bays and isles of Brittany—­a land so like our own western seaboard, with its wild Atlantic storms.  Following the ocean southward, we find the same race extending to the Loire, the Garonne, the Pyrenees; stretching somewhat inland also, but clinging everywhere to the Atlantic, as we also saw it cling in Ireland.  In earlier centuries, long before our era opened, we find this same race spread far to the east,—­as far, almost, as the German and Italian frontier,—­so that at one time it held almost complete possession of France.  South of the Pyrenees we find it once more; dominant in Portugal, less strongly represented in Spain, yet still supplying a considerable part of the population of the whole peninsula, as it does in Ireland at the present day.  But it does not stop with Spain, or even Europe.  We find the same race again in the Guanches of the Canary islands, off the African coast; and, stranger still, we find mummies of this race, of great antiquity, in the cave-tombs of Teneriffe.  Further, we have ample evidence of its presence, until displaced by Moorish invaders, all along northern Africa as far as Tunis; and we come across it again amongst the living races in the Mediterranean isles, in Sardinia, Sicily and Southern Italy.  Finally, the Tuaregs of the Central Sahara belong to the same type.  Everywhere the same tall, dark race, handsome, imaginative; with a quite definite form of head, of brow, of eyes; a well-marked character of visage, complexion, and texture of hair.

Thus far the southern extension of this, our second Irish race; we may look for a moment at its distribution in the north.  Across the shallow sea which separates us from Britain we find the same race, clinging always to the Atlantic seaboard.  It dominates south Wales, where its presence was remarked and commented on by the invading Romans.  It is present elsewhere through the Welsh mountains, and much more sparsely over the east of England; but we have ample evidence that at one time this tall, dark race held the whole of England in undisputed possession, except, perhaps, for a remnant of the Hyperborean dwarfs.  In the west of Scotland, and especially in the Western Isles, it is once more numerous; and we find offshoots of the same race in the dark-haired Norwegians,—­still holding to the seaboard of the Atlantic.