t their true value advantages already acquired and
progress already accomplished. If one were suddenly carried twenty or
thirty centuries backward, into the midst of that which was then called
Gaul, one would not recognize France. The same mountains reared their
heads; the same plains stretched far and wide; the same rivers rolled on
their course. There is no alteration in the physical formation of the
country; but its aspect was very different. Instead of the fields all
trim with cultivation, and all covered with various produce, one would
see inaccessible morasses and vast forests, as yet uncleared, given up to
the chances of primitive vegetation, peopled with wolves and bears, and
even the _urns_, or huge wild ox, and with elks, too--a kind of beast
that one finds no longer nowadays, save in the colder regions of
north-eastern Europe, such as Lithuania and Courland. Then wandered
over the champaign great herds of swine, as fierce almost as wolves,
tamed only so far as to know the sound of their keeper's horn. The
better sort of fruits and of vegetables were quite unknown; they were
imported into Gaul--the greatest part from Asia, a portion from Africa
and the islands of the Mediterranean; and others, at a later period,
from the New World. Cold and rough was the prevailing temperature.
Nearly every winter the rivers froze sufficiently hard for the passage
of cars. And three or four centuries before the Christian era, on that
vast territory comprised between the ocean, the Pyrenees, the
Mediterranean, the Alps, and the Rhine, lived six or seven millions of
men a bestial life, enclosed in dwellings dark and low, the best of them
built of wood and clay, covered with branches or straw, made in a single
round piece, open to daylight by the door alone, and confusedly heaped
together behind a rampart, not inartistically composed of timber, earth,
and stone, which surrounded and protected what they were pleased to call
a town.

[Illustration: Ideal Landscape of Ancient Gaul----13]

Of even such towns there were scarcely any as yet, save in the most
populous and least uncultivated portion of Gaul; that is to say, in the
southern and eastern regions, at the foot of the mountains of Auvergne
and the Cevennes, and along the coasts of the Mediterranean. In the
north and the west were paltry hamlets, as transferable almost as the
people themselves; and on some islet amidst the morasses, or in some
hidden recess of the fore