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