Geology--Fossil shells--Antediluvian salmon--The Druids--Chindonax,
the High Priest--Roman antiquities--Julius Caesar's
hunting-box--Lugubrious village--Carre-les-Tombes--The Inquisitive
Andalusian.

Le Morvan, independently of its hunting and fishing, its lovely climate
and fine wines, pretty girls and jolly _cures_, possesses a more
important class of beauties and perfections, secrets and enigmas, over
which the _savans_ would pore and ponder through many a day and many a
night: those men who, like Eve, long to grasp the fatal apple--the apple
which destroys while it attracts--the apple whose flavour, alas! is so
bitter,--the apple of science. Let the geologists, who are ever bending
in earnest study over the mysteries of nature, and breaking stones by
the road-side,--who are ever seeking to analyse the _materiel_ of
creation,--who are always contemplating the internal and geognostic
constitution of the globe, the red or the blue clay, the yellow gravel,
the trappe, the limestone, the granite, or the slate, to satisfy
themselves what this poor planet is made of,--let them come and ransack
Le Morvan. Let them bring their hammers and chisels, their compasses and
barometers, and above all, their passport,--precious document! an
hundredfold more useful in France, in these liberty days, than a pair of
shoes or a shirt,--let them come, and I promise them endless
discoveries, a rich and ample harvest.

In the meadow lands, when, for the purpose of sinking wells, the soil is
penetrated to an immense depth, the workmen often come to thick strata
of schist, in which they find imbedded trunks and roots of trees, and
stalks of plants and ferns, which now grow in tropical climates only.

In the highest and steepest parts of the mountain chain may be found
marine petrifactions of every variety--the sea-hedgehog, the oyster, the
mussel, and the star-fish; and in the beds of trachytic rock, deposited
in such order that one might fancy they had been placed there by a
careful and tasty housewife, are layers of the most curious shells,
univalve, bivalve, sublivalve and multivalve, madrepors, and shapeless
remnants of creatures now no longer known, and petrified fish.

Some few years ago, an engineer, who was carrying a road through a rock
in the mountain called the Val d'Arcy, found a salmon in the most
perfect condition, even with head and tail, the unhappy wretch enclosed
in the heart of a large stone. I should