The Zoologist — August, 1869. T797 



instance, was with the invaders in spirit as much as in body ; in the 

 latter case his presence and sympathies were with the invaded ; the 

 sympathies of the historian, in both instances, were with his people, 

 and the sympathy of" after ages has been with the historian : thus we 

 all believe in the barbarism ot tlie Anialekites and Hittites, and also in 

 the barbarism of those eleven thousand knights in polished armour of 

 chain-mail and crowned with burnished casques and flowing plumes, 

 who, with a million of retainers, swept " a human deluge" over central 

 Europe and devastated Italy. The similarity between the two in- 

 vasions is to be foiimi in this, that both the invaders when compared 

 with the invaded were strangers to that luxury which steeps the soul 

 of man in sin, and rots the immortal while it enfeebles the mortal 

 ingredient of the compound man. The Exodus of the Israelites was 

 from a land of bondage to a land of freedom ; that of the Teuton from 

 some region still unknown, to a land whose wealth and whose advan- 

 tages had been for centuries on centuries a lure to attract the hardy, 

 the adventurous, the ambitious, the covetous : both migrated towards 

 a " promised land flowing with milk and honey." The Israelites threw 

 themselves recklessly on the spears of the Amalekites, the Teutons on 

 the swords of the Romans. 1 am well aware that Divine protection 

 was constantly afforded to the former, and is supposed to have been 

 denied to the latter ; but here, as in so many other cases, the facts 

 remain and cannot be disputed. The emperor Marcus Aurelius 

 Claudius, in a report to the Roman Senate of the battle of Naissus, 

 in which the Romans defeated a Gothic army three hundred thousand 

 strong, declares that the slaughter was so prodigious that the rivers 

 were filled with their shields, swords and lances, and the banks 

 covered with these implements of war, and that the fields were hidden 

 by the bones of horses and men. The followers of Attila, for years 

 previous to the day when he stood on the once sacred soil of pros- 

 trate Rome, filled the rivers of Italy with his dead, and polluted 

 the atmosphere with the stench of putrifying human flesh. The 

 Allemanni, a name which some historians have derived from the words 

 "All" "Men," froin their immense numbers and various lineage, laid 

 waste the north of Italy in the year 260, and reached Ravenna, but 

 proceeded no farther : in the same year the Franks poured through 

 France, crossed the Pyrenees, swept the whole of Spain, and, crossing 

 at the straits of Gibraltar, carried their victorious arras into Africa, 

 pursuing their course until there was nothing found to conquer or 

 destroy. 



