Ancient Man in Britain

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Blackie and Son limited, 1922 - Great Britain - 257 pages
 

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Page 110 - Thou sleepest, and hast forgotten me, O Achilles. Not in my life wast thou ever unmindful of me, but in my death. Bury me with all speed, that I pass the gates of Hades. Far off the spirits banish me, the phantoms of men outworn, nor suffer me to mingle with them beyond the River, but vainly I wander along the widegated dwelling of Hades. Now give me, I pray pitifully of thee, thy hand, for never more again shall I come back from Hades, when ye have given me my due of fire.
Page 172 - It is an ordinary Custom, when any of the Fishermen are detained in the Isle, by contrary Winds, to wash the blue Stone with water all round, expecting thereby to procure a favourable Wind...
Page 126 - So striking is the family likeness between the Early Neolithic peoples of the British Isles and the Mediterranean and the bulk of the population, both ancient and modern, of Egypt and East Africa, that a description of the bones of an Early Briton of that remote epoch might apply in all essential details to an inhabitant of Somaliland.
Page 192 - ... wings, mount from the dead man's body into the air and go fluttering round his head. So he ran to bring the scholars; and when they saw it they all knew it was the soul of their master, and they watched with wonder and awe until it passed from sight into the clouds. And this was the first butterfly that was ever seen in Ireland; and now all men know that the butterflies are the souls of the dead waiting for the moment when they may enter Purgatory, and so pass through torture to purification...
Page 146 - For a' the blude that's shed on earth Rins through the springs o' that countrie. Syne they came on to a garden green, And she pu'd an apple frae a tree — * ' Take this for thy wages, true Thomas ; It will give thee the tongue that can never lie.' 'My tongue is mine ain,' true Thomas said; 'A gudely gift ye wad gie to me!
Page 11 - I was a good deal struck by the resemblance which they bear to each other; a resemblance so complete, that the most practised eye can hardly distinguish between the weapons of the old Scot and the New Zealander. . . . Man in the savage state is the same animal everywhere, and his constructive powers, whether employed in the formation of a legendary story or of a battle-axe, seem to expatiate almost everywhere in the same rugged track of invention. For even the traditions of this first stage may be...
Page 10 - His short, thick-set, and coarsely built body was carried in a halfstooping slouch upon short, powerful, and half-flexed legs of peculiarly ungraceful form. His thick neck sloped forward from the broad shoulders to support the massive flattened head, which protruded forward, so as to form an unbroken curve of neck and back, in place of the alternation of curves which is one of the graces of the truly erect Homo sapiens.
Page 118 - Spanish crews of the wrecked armada—a face which, at the time, reminded me of the Nineveh sculptures, and of faces seen in St. Sebastian. Her hair was as black as night, and her clear dark eyes glittered through the peat smoke. Her complexion was dark, and her features so unlike those who sat about her, that I asked if she were a native of the island, and learned that she was a Highland girl.
Page 123 - When a race is well seated in a region, fixed to the soil by agriculture, acclimatised by natural selection and sufficiently dense, it opposes (for the most precise observations confirm it) an enormous resistance to absorption by the newcomers, whoever they may be.
Page 219 - ... at a depth of four feet in the clay the copper axe was found. The author accordingly remarks : " It must have been deposited along with the blue clay prior to the formation of the superincumbent stratum of sand, and must have existed before the diluvial operations by which that stratum was formed. This opinion of its antiquity is strongly confirmed by the peculiarity of its shape, and the nature of its composition."1 When, in 1850, my brother, Dr.

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