Thus the Celts before setting out on their Wanderjahre may already have been a mixed race, even if their leaders were of purer stock.  But they had the bond of common speech, institutions, and religion, and they formed a common Celtic type in Central and Western Europe.  Intermarriage with the already mixed Neolithic folk of Central Europe produced further removal from the unmixed Celtic racial type; but though both reacted on each other as far as language, custom, and belief were concerned, on the whole the Celtic elements predominated in these respects.  The Celtic migration into Gaul produced further racial mingling with descendants of the old palaeolithic stock, dolichocephalic Iberians and Ligurians, and brachycephalic swarthy folk (Broca’s Celts).  Thus even the first Celtic arrivals in Britain, the Goidels, were a people of mixed race, though probably relatively purer than the late coming Brythons, the latest of whom had probably mingled with the Teutons.  Hence among Celtic-speaking folk or their descendants—­short, dark, broad-beaded Bretons, tall, fair or rufous Highlanders, tall chestnut-haired Welshmen or Irishmen, Highlanders of Norse descent, short, dark, narrow-headed Highlanders, Irishmen, and Welshmen—­there is a common Celtic facies, the result of old Celtic characteristics powerful enough so to impress themselves on such varied peoples in spite of what they gave to the Celtic incomers.  These peoples became Celtic, and Celtic in speech and character they have remained, even where ancestral physical types are reasserting themselves.  The folk of a Celtic type, whether pre-Celtic, Celtic, or Norse, have all spoken a Celtic language and exhibit the same old Celtic characteristics—­vanity, loquacity, excitability, fickleness, imagination, love of the romantic, fidelity, attachment to family ties, sentimental love of their country, religiosity passing over easily to superstition, and a comparatively high degree of sexual morality.  Some of these traits were already noted by classical observers.

Celtic speech had early lost the initial p of old Indo-European speech, except in words beginning with pt and, perhaps, ps.  Celtic pare (Lat. prae) became are, met with in Aremorici, “the dwellers by the sea,” Arecluta, “by the Clyde,” the region watered by the Clyde.  Irish athair, Manx ayr, and Irish iasg, represent respectively Latin pater and piscis. P occurring between vowels was also lost, e.g.  Irish caora, “sheep,” is from kaperax; for, “upon” (Lat. super), from uper.  This change took place before the Goidelic Celts broke away and invaded Britain in the tenth century B.C., but while Celts and Teutons were still in contact, since Teutons borrowed words with initial p, e.g.  Gothic fairguni, “mountain,” from Celtic percunion, later Ercunio, the Hercynian forest.  The