Even to those familiar with the geological record of man it is sufficiently startling to find that the Firbolgs, the early dwarfish race of Hyperboreans, in all probability were ignorant of boats; that they almost certainly came to our island dry-shod, as they had come earlier to Britain, migrating over unbroken spaces of land to what afterwards became the isle of Erin; for this race we find everywhere associated with the mammoth—­on the continent, in Britain, in our own island—­and the mammoths certainly never came over in ships.  Needless to say, there is abundant geological evidence as well, to show our former union with continental Europe,—­though of course at a time immensely more remote than ten or twelve thousand years ago.

We are, therefore, led to identify our Atlantean race of hardy seamen with the Fomorians who came up out of the sea and found the furtive Firbolgs in possession of our island; and to this race, the Fomorians of the sea, we credit the building of cromlechs and standing stones, not only among ourselves, but in Norway, in Britain, in Brittany, in Spain, in Africa.

We shall presently pick up the thread of tradition, as we find it in Ireland, and try to follow the doings and life of the Fomorian invaders; but in the meantime we may try to gain some insight into the most mysterious and enduring of their works.  The cromlechs which have been excavated in many cases are found to contain the funereal urns of a people who burned their dead.  It does not follow that their first and only use was as tombs; but if we think of them as tombs only, we must the more marvel at the faith of the builders, and their firm belief in the reality and overwhelming import of the other world which we enter at death.  For of dwellings for the living, of fortresses or storehouses, of defences against the foes who later invaded them, we find few traces; nothing at all to compare with their massive mausoleums.  The other world, for them, was a far weightier concern than this, and to the purposes of that world, as they conceived it, all their energies were directed.  We can hardly doubt that, like other races who pay extreme reverence to the dead, their inner vision beheld these departed ones still around them and among them, forming with them a single race, a single family, a single life.  This world was for them only the threshold of the other, the place of preparation.  To that other their thoughts all turned, for that other they raised these titanic buildings.  The solemn masses and simple grandeur of the cromlechs fitly symbolize the mood of reverence in which they drew near to the sublime world of the hidden; the awe with which their handiwork affirmed how greatly that world outweighs this.  At these houses of the dead they were joined in spirit and communion with those who had passed away; once more united with their fathers and their fathers’ fathers, from the dim beginning of their race.  The air, for them, was full of spirits.  Only the dead truly lived.