ban life stands the activity of intercourse
by land and by water. Everywhere there were roads and bridges.
The river-navigation, which streams like the Rhone, Garonne, Loire,
and Seine, of themselves invited, was considerable and lucrative.
But far more remarkable was the maritime navigation of the Celts.
Not only were the Celts, to all appearance, the nation that first
regularly navigated the Atlantic ocean, but we find that the art
of building and of managing vessels had attained among them
a remarkable development. The navigation of the peoples
of the Mediterranean had, as may readily be conceived from the nature
of the waters traversed by them, for a comparatively long period
adhered to the oar; the war-vessels of the Phoenicians, Hellenes,
and Romans were at all times oared galleys, in which the sail
was applied only as an occasional aid to the oar; the trading vessels
alone were in the epoch of developed ancient civilization "sailers"
properly so called.(14) On the other hand the Gauls doubtless
employed in the Channel in Caesar's time, as for long afterwards,
a species of portable leathern skiffs, which seem to have been
in the main common oared boats, but on the west coast of Gaul
the Santones, the Pictones, and above all the Veneti sailed in large
though clumsily built ships, which were not impelled by oars
but were provided with leathern sails and iron anchor-chains;
and they employed these not only for their traffic with Britain,
but also in naval combat. Here therefore we not only meet
for the first time with navigation in the open ocean, but we find
that here the sailing vessel first fully took the place
of the oared boat--an improvement, it is true, which the declining
activity of the old world did not know how to turn to account,
and the immeasurable results of which our own epoch of renewed culture
is employed in gradually reaping.

Commerce
Manufactures

With this regular maritime intercourse between the British
and Gallic coasts, the very close political connection between
the inhabitants on both sides of the Channel is as easily explained
as the flourishing of transmarine commerce and of fisheries.
It was the Celts of Brittany in particular, that brought the tin
of the mines of Cornwall from England and carried it by the river
and land routes of Gaul to Narbo and Massilia. The statement,
that in Caesar's time certain tribes at the mouth of the Rhine subsisted
on fish and birds' eggs, may pr