umber of islands in the Seine and Caesar's statements
concerning the Gauls and their manners and customs are now disputed.
When it comes to the origin of things and of peoples, the erudition is
profound. M. G. de Mortillet proposes for the epoch _quaternaire_ or
_pleistocene_ four successive divisions,--in their order of antiquity,
the _Chelleen_, the _Mousterien_, the _Solutreen_, and the
_Magdalenien_; M. Perrier du Carne thinks that the traces of the Solutre
and of the Madeleine show them to have been derived from two races long
contemporary on the same soil, of which the former were autochthonous
and the latter, immigrants, who came in with the reindeer and followed
him when he retreated northward. M. Piette objects to the word
_Magdalenien_, and proposes to replace it by _glyptique_, for, during
this period, man learned to carve bones with flint instruments; after
the _Solutre_ he places the epoch _Eburneenne_, and after that, the
_Tarandienne_, characterized by instruments in reindeer's horns. After
the quaternary period, Professor Alexandre Bertrand, of the Ecole du
Louvre, places the _Megalithiques_, whom he thinks belonged to the great
ethnological family of the Touranians which preceded the Aryans in
Europe, and who erected the great stone monuments, dolmens, menhirs,
cromlechs, etc., formerly called druidical, found in various parts of
Europe. Several of these _monuments megalithiques_ have been discovered
in Paris and its environs,--a street of the Faubourg du Temple owes its
name of Pierre-Levee (raised stone) to the fact that at its opening, in
1782, an enormous ancient rock was found artificially supported on two
others, the funerary tumulus, or mound, which formerly covered it having
disappeared.

As it is impossible to attribute any longer these prehistoric monuments
to the "Celts," or to "their priests, the Druids," so do others of our
historical illusions vanish. M. Duruy, in his learned _Histoire de
France_, states that at the dawn of history the country known as Gaul
was "divided between three or four hundred tribes (_peuplades_)
belonging to the three great families,--the Celts, the Iberians, and the
Belgians." M. Guizot says that "in the south were Iberians or
Aquitanians, Phoenicians and Greeks; in the north and northwest,
Kymrians or Belgians; everywhere else, Gauls or Celts, the most numerous
settlers, who had the honor of giving their name to the country." M.
Salomon Reinach, in his detailed d