Cornish

Cornish, the inhabitants of Cornwall, present a red and a dark type, some being the darkest people in England. There appears to be a primitive Iberian substratum mixed, at an early date, first with Gadhaelic and later with Kymric Celts. Prof. J. Rhys thinks that Gadhaelic survived in Cornwall down to the sixth century, after which Kymric became the exclusive language, gradually yielding to English and at last dying out about 1770. Except some glosses and the Cotton MS. vocabulary, the oldest known specimen of Cornish is 36 lines of a drama discovered in 1877 by Henry Jenner on the back of a charter of about the year 1400. The language still lives in the universal geographical nomenclature, such elements as tre (village or town), pol (lake, pool), pen (head, crest) occurring at every step, whence the local saying, "By tre, pol, and pen, you may know the Cornishmen." The numerous so-called druidical remains (dolmens, menhirs, hanging stones) are generally attributed to the Celts, but they must obviously be referred to the same race that erected similar structures in Brittany as well as in North Africa and other regions where the presence of Celts has never been suspected. This race represents the non-Aryan element occupying West Europe before the arrival of the Aryan Celts, and now merged with them.