THE CELTS AXD GAULS. 115 



that about b.c. 300 the)' had already absorbed a part of the 

 German race named the Cimri, or Cimbri. Defeated, 

 however, in Greece, at an attack on the temple of Apollo at 

 Delphi, destruction awaited them, and with the exception of 

 several tribes who passed into Asia Minor, and assumed the 

 name of Galatians, we hear little or nothing of the Celts on 

 the Danube or the south of Germany. Tribes of German 

 origin occupied the whole country as far as the Rhine? 

 and even beyond that river. But the Cimbri, a mixed 

 race of Gauls and Germans, whom the Gauls themselves 

 designated BelgcE, occupied the whole northern part of 

 Gaul, from the Seine and Marne to the British Channel, 

 from whence they passed over into Britain. Here they 

 drove back those Gauls who had made themselves masters 

 of the country at an earlier period, to North Britain 

 (Scotland), where the latter afterwards appear under the 

 namie of Caledonians or Highland Gaels, and still later 

 as the Picts and Scots.' These Belgae or Gallo-Cimbri 

 are, in fact, the ancient Britons, the inhabitants of the 

 land of the Cymry. 



The Emperor Napoleon" concisely sums up their 

 history in the following words : ' There are peoples whose 

 existence in the past only reveals itself by certain brilliant 

 apparitions, unequivocal proofs of an energy which had 

 been previously unknown. During the interval their 

 history is involved in obscurity, and they resemble those 

 long silent volcanoes, which we should take to be extinct 

 but for the eruptions which, at periods far apart, occur 

 and expose to view the fire which smoulders in their 

 bosom. Such had been the Gauls. The accounts of 



' Popular Encyclopaedia, pt. 5. ' Vie de Caesar, vol. ii. p. r. 



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