Excerpt from The Invasions of England, Vol. 1 of 2: A History of the Past, With Lessons for the Future Of the earliest history of the island little is really known. The science of language and the earliest records of history teach us that Europe has been peopled by con secutive incursions of tribes who, springing from the teeming population of Asia, have been driven into our continent by the desire of change or the compulsion of war.1 The first of these arrivals were pressed by the advances of their successors further and further west ward, until, reachin g the shores of the Atlantic, they were forced either to turn at bay or to seek some other coasts whither the full pressure of the eastern exodus had not yet extended. Great families of mankind are said to have crossed in succession from Asia into Europe - the Celtic, the Gothic, and the Slavonic. The Celtic race is supposed to have been already settled on the northern shores of the Black Sea at the time of the production of Homer's Odyssey, but before Herodotus wrote his history to have been dispossessed by the Gothic family, and pushed in a north-easterly direction to the shores of the Baltic, the German Ocean, and the British Channel. Various tribes of the former family are said to have crossed from their settlements on the mainland to the island which we now call Britain. Whether these were the early savages, who have left us a silent history of their existence in cromlechs and relics of flint, or whether these disturbed already esta blished inhabitants, it is hardly possible even to conjecture. The first of the Celtic tribes who landed on these shores are supposed to have been soon followed by the Cimbri. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.