416 NATURAL HISTORY OF 



that of plundering and ravaging - the coasts of Africa and 

 Spain. They and their chief may perhaps refer to the remark- 

 able escape of the Frankish exiled prisoners, who, in A. D. 

 280, seized upon shipping on the coasts of the Euxine, and 

 forced their way homeward, plundering Syracuse and the 

 coasts of Gaul and Spain, until they reached the mouth of the 

 Rhine in safety, and loaded with booty. This event may be 

 the basis of the mystical legend of the Bristly Bull monster, 

 which rose out of the sea, and became the parent of the Bor- 

 stigen, Meringauen, or Meeringen; for it explains how a 

 daring, rich, and victorious body of Celto Scythae and Finni 

 of the west, being moulded into one united companionship by 

 misfortune and by success, replete with the experience of their 

 adventurous achievement, and possessed of captive wives and 

 slaves from highly civilized nations, should have grasped power 

 at home, and given that settled purpose of conquest to these 

 restless tribes, which, until then, had been only known as the 

 mere maraudings of pirates. 



By the departure of the Franks eastward and across the 

 Rhine, and of the Saxons and Angles to Britain, room was 

 made for other tribes, who either wanted space on the spot, or 

 were daily pressing onwards through the swamps and for.ests 

 of Poland and Russia. We shall not relate the great influx 

 of them before and with the Huns, and of numerous Finnic 

 and Getic nations from the east, among which the eastern and 

 western Goths were the most conspicuous. Like several 

 others, they had struck upon the shores of the southern Baltic, 

 and then found they must turn to the south. They or similar 

 migratory bands compelled Alans, Vandals, Burgundians, &c, 

 to precede or to follow them, and to produce that remarkable 

 cross migration from north to south, which caused the intimate 

 mixture of the fair and dark-haired races in middle and south- 

 ern Europe, and in the end effected that thorough civilization 

 of the whole, on principles of progression, continuing to 



