MEMORIALS OF ANTIQUITY. 19 



sweep across the face of Europe. Like the watchman, we cannot 

 refuse to be moved by the spectacle, by the stir and the tumult ; but 

 it is only considerations of duty that can induce us to descend from 

 our security, and mingle in the fray. 



Brittany belongs to what geologists call the primitive and inter- 

 mediary formations. It is divided into three belts or longitudinal 

 trenches : those of the north and south consist of primitive rocks, 

 granite and porphyry ; the central appertains to a more recent forma- 

 tion, to the group of intermediary or secondary rocks, cojnposed in 

 the main of schists and mica-schists, quartz, and gneiss. Schist pre- 

 vails over a considerable area, and is prolonged to the very extremity 

 of the peninsula. These hard, compact, impervious rocks, are entirely 

 bare in many places ; elsewhere, and over a great extent, they are 

 covered but by a thin layer of clayey and sandy earth, where the 

 sudden slopes of the soil do not allow the rains to settle. 



Here are the plains, often of considerable dimensions, which, 

 bristling with rocks, and broken up by ravines, water-courses, and 

 marshes, constitute the Landes of Brittany. True deserts these, 

 relieved at distant points by an isolated hut, or by a wandering herd 

 of swine, lean cows, and meagre-looking horses, which obtain a scanty 

 subsistence from the heathery soil, sown here and there with tufts of 

 furze, broom, and fern. 



Under a sky of almost continual sombreness, like that which 

 impends over the pottery districts of England, these landes present a 

 sufficiently sinister and uninviting aspect. The traveller, as he crosses 

 their sepulchral wastes, will hardly marvel that they were anciently 

 a chosen seat of Druidical worship. Like Dartmoor, they would 

 seem to have offered a peculiarly fitting arena for the rites and 

 ceremonies of a creed which we know to have been mysterious in 

 character and sanguinary in spirit. They are covered with its gray 

 memorials : the masses of granite of different shapes known as Maen 

 hirs, or " long stones," and peulvcns, which appear to have been 

 employed as sepulchral monuments; dolmens, or "table-stones;" and 

 cromlechs (crom, bowed or bending, and lech, a stone), which anti- 



