certainly have pronounced this
fish to be a cod, had not science decided it was a salmon of a large
species--_genus salmo_, sixty vertebrae. It is now to be seen in the
Natural History department, section _Salmonidae_, of the Museum in the
Jardin des Plantes, at Paris.

Poor old salmon! said I, and I took off my hat when I had the honour of
being presented to him; Poor old salmon! what wouldst thou have said,
some twelve or fifteen thousand years ago, when, free and glorious thou
didst pierce the briny waves,--when, perhaps, thou wast gambolling
amongst the pointed summits of the Alps, plunging in ecstacy into the
emerald depths of oceans now vanished,--what wouldst thou have said,
could the thought have crossed thy brain, that one day thou shouldst be
_here_? Under a glass! ticketted, numbered, pasted to the wall! forming
an item in a collection of things fabulous, and exhibiting thy venerable
form, thine antediluvian physiognomy, to thousands of _badauds_, who
either pass thee without a glance, or examine thee with unfeeling
curiosity, bestowing not a thought upon thy great age or thy cruel fate,
or with a whit more respect for thee and thine awful history, than a
cockney would show to a whitebait caught but yesterday in the Thames,
and served up to him as a fraction of his fishy feast at Blackwall.

Le Morvan, abounding in forests, was a district most congenial to the
gloomy spirit of the religion of the ancient Druids; and therefore, in
the earliest days of the history of France, they consecrated its groves
of splendid oaks to the performance of their terrible rites. Remains of
many of their massive monuments still exist, in the fields, in the deep
valleys, and on the tops of the hills. Antique and mysterious all of
them--three-pointed stones, three-cornered stones, and massive groups of
stones in mystic circle ranged, round which, the peasant will tell you
with bated breath, _les Gaurics_--the spirits of the giants--come to
weep and bewail on the first night of each new moon. During the last
century, a peasant, who was at work in a deep ditch in a beautiful field
of this district, came, in the course of his excavations, upon a stone
which indicated, that he was not far from one of those monuments with
which he was so familiar; and, upon further investigation, it proved to
be the black granite tomb of the famous Chindonax, the high-priest of
the Druids. It contained many relics--the sickle and the collar of
gold, t