Accordingly, he determines the physical type
of each of the two great Celtic families, the Gaels and the Cymris,
who are said to have been distributed in a certain order through
Gaul, and then he tracks these types in the population of France at
the present day, and so verifies the alleged original order of
distribution. In doing this, he makes excursions into neighbouring
countries where the Gaels and the Cymris have been, and he declares
that in England he finds abundant traces of the physical type which
he has established as the Cymric, still subsisting in our population,
and having descended from the old British possessors of our soil
before the Saxon conquest. But if we are to believe the current
English opinion, says Monsieur Edwards, the stock of these old
British possessors is clean gone. On this opinion he makes the
following comment:-
'In the territory occupied by the Saxons, the Britons were no longer
an independent nation, nor even a people with any civil existence at
all. For history, therefore, they were dead, above all for history
as it was then written; but they had not perished; they still lived
on, and undoubtedly in such numbers as the remains of a great nation,
in spite of its disasters, might still be expected to keep. That the
Britons were destroyed or expelled from England, properly so called,
is, as I have said, a popular opinion in that country.
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