eft their countries, to go to
seek others which were hardly any better. It is true, if there be
anything true in ancient history, that there were some Gaulish brigands
who went to pillage Rome in the time of Camillus. Other Gaulish brigands
had passed, it is said, through Illyria on the way to hire their
services as murderers to other murderers, in the direction of Thrace;
they exchanged their blood for bread, and later established themselves
in Galatia. But who were these Gauls? were they Berichons and Angevins?
They were without a doubt Gauls whom the Romans called Cisalpines, and
whom we call Transalpines, famished mountain-dwellers, neighbours of the
Alps and the Apennines. The Gauls of the Seine and the Marne did not
know at that time that Rome existed, and could not take it into their
heads to pass Mount Cenis, as Hannibal did later, to go to steal the
wardrobes of Roman senators who at that time for all furniture had a
robe of poor grey stuff, ornamented with a band the colour of ox blood;
two little pummels of ivory, or rather dog's bone, on the arms of a
wooden chair; and in their kitchens a piece of rancid bacon.

The Gauls, who were dying of hunger, not finding anything to eat in
Rome, went off therefore to seek their fortune farther away, as was the
practice of the Romans later, when they ravaged so many countries one
after the other; as did the peoples of the North when they destroyed the
Roman Empire.

And, further, what is it which instructs very feebly about these
emigrations? It is a few lines that the Romans wrote at hazard; because
for the Celts, the Velches or the Gauls, these men who it is desired to
make pass for eloquent, at that time did not know, they and their bards,
how either to read or write.

But to infer from that that the Gauls or Celts, conquered after by a few
of Caesar's legions, and by a horde of Bourguignons, and lastly by a
horde of Sicamores, under one Clodovic, had previously subjugated the
whole world, and given their names and laws to Asia, seems to me to be
very strange: the thing is not mathematically impossible, and if it be
_demonstrated_, I give way; it would be very uncivil to refuse to the
Velches what one accords to the Tartars.

_ARTS_

THAT THE NEWNESS OF THE ARTS IN NO WISE PROVES THE NEWNESS OF THE GLOBE

All the philosophers thought matter eternal but the arts appear new.
There is not one, even to the art of making bread, which is not recent.
The firs