When kept, it may usually have been stored, like that of Robinson Crusoe, in baskets;[27] for basket-making was a peculiarly British industry, and Posidonius found “British baskets” in use on the Continent.  But probably it was also hoarded—­again in Crusoe fashion—­in the large jars of coarse pottery which are occasionally found on British sites.  These, and the smaller British vessels, are sometimes elaborately ornamented with devices of no small artistic merit.  But all are hand-made, the potter’s wheel being unknown in pre-Roman days.

E. 6.—­Nor does the grinding of corn, even in hand-mills, seem to have been universal till the Roman era, the earlier British method being to bruise the grain in a mortar.[28] Without the resources of civilization it is not easy to deal with stones hard enough for satisfactory millstones.  We find that the Romans, when they came, mostly selected for this use the Hertfordshire “pudding-stone,” a conglomerate of the Eocene period crammed with rolled flint pebbles, sometimes also bringing over Niederendig lava from the Rhine valley, and burr-stone from the Paris basin for their querns.

E. 7.—­These tribes are described as living in cheap [[Greek:  euteleis]] dwellings, constructed of reeds or logs, yet spoken of as subterranean.[29] Light has been thrown on this apparent contradiction by the excavation in 1889 of the site of a British village at Barrington in Cambridgeshire.  Within a space of about sixty yards each way, bounded by a fosse some six feet wide and four deep, were a collection of roughly circular pits, distributed in no recognizable system, from twelve to twenty feet in diameter and from two to four in depth.  They were excavated in the chalky soil, and from each a small drainage channel ran for a yard or two down the gentle slope on which the settlement stood.  Obviously a superstructure of thatch and wattle would convert these pits into quite passable wigwams, corresponding to the description of Pytheas.  This whole village was covered by several feet of top-soil in which were found numerous interments of Anglo-Saxon date.  It had seemingly perished by fire, a layer of incinerated matter lying at the bottom of each pit.

E. 8.—­The domestic cattle of the Britons were a diminutive breed, smaller than the existing Alderney, with abnormally developed foreheads (whence their scientific name Bos Longifrons).  Their remains, the skulls especially, are found in every part of the land, with no trace, in pre-Roman times, of any other breed.  The gigantic wild ox of the British forests (Bos Primigenius) seems never to have been tamed by the Celtic tribes, who, very possibly, like the Romans after them, may have brought their own cattle with them into the island.  According to Professor Rolleston the small size of the breed is due to the large consumption of milk by the breeders. (He notes that the cattle of Burmah and Hindostan are identically the same stock, and