B.2.—­It is almost certain, however, that the Neolithic men were not of Aryan blood.  They are commonly spoken of by the name of Ugrians,[7] the “ogres"[8] of our folk-lore; which has also handed down, in the spiteful Brownie of the wood and the crafty Pixie of the cavern, dimly-remembered traditions of their physical and mental characteristics.  Indeed it is not impossible that their blood may still be found in the remoter corners of our land, whither they were pushed back by the higher civilization of the Aryan invaders, before whom they disappeared by a process in which “miscegenation” may well have played no small part.  But disappear they did, leaving behind them no more traces than their flint arrow-heads and axes (a few of these being of jadite, which must have come from China or thereabouts), together with their oblong sepulchral barrows, from some of which the earth has weathered away, so that the massive stones imbedded in it as the last home of the deceased stand exposed as a “dolmen” or “cromlech.”  But an appreciable number of the earthworks which stud our hill-tops, and are popularly called “Roman” or “British” camps, really belong to this older race.  Such are “Cony Castle” in Dorset, and the fortifications along the Axe in Devon.

B. 3.—­During the neolithic stage of their development the Ugrians were acquainted with but one metal, gold, and some of their stone weapons and implements are thus ornamented.  For gold, being at once the most beautiful, the most incorruptible, the most easily recognizable, and the most easily worked of metals, is everywhere found as used by man long before any other.  But before the Ugrian races vanish they had learnt to use bronze, which shows them to have discovered the properties not only of gold, but of both tin and copper.  All three metals were doubtless obtained from the streams of the West.  They had also become proficients, as their sepulchral urns show, in the manufacture of pottery.  They could weave, moreover, both linen and woollen being known, and had passed far beyond the mere savage.

B. 4.—­The race, indeed, which could erect Avebury and Stonehenge, as we may safely say was done by this people,[9] must have possessed engineering skill of a very high order, and no little accuracy of astronomical observation.  For the mighty “Sarsen” stones have all been brought from a distance,[10] and the whole vast circles are built on a definite astronomical plan; while so careful is the orientation that, at the summer solstice, the disc of the rising sun, as seen from the “altar” of Stonehenge, appears to be poised exactly on the summit of one of the chief megaliths (now known as “The Friar’s Heel").  From this it would seem that the builders were Sun-worshippers; and amongst the earliest reports of Britain current in the Greek world we find the fame of the “great round temple” dedicated to Apollo.  But no Latin author mentions it; so that it is doubtful whether it was ever used by the Aryan, or at least by the Brythonic, immigrants.  These brought their own worship and their own civilization with them, and all that was highest in Ugrian civilization and worship faded before them, such Ugrians as remained having degenerated to a far lower level when first we meet with them in history.