20 APPEARANCE OP THE LANDES. 



The Bretons of Cornwall, according to a French writer, are elevated 

 but a little above the true savage life. Those who dwell upon the 

 coast live on the products of their fishing, except when the fortunate 

 occurrence of a wreck provides them with temporary abundance. 

 At bottom, they possess the qualities and defects of characters 

 strongly tempered, but absolutely uncultivated. They are as hard 

 and bare as their own granite rocks. Persevering, courageous, 

 resolute, they make excellent sailors, the best which France can 

 find ; the sea is for them a second country. Progress, which they 

 do not understand, inspires them with a sort of terror, a gloomy mis- 

 trust. When the railway surveyors first intruded upon their solitudes, 

 these rigid conservatives assailed them with volleys of stones, and, 

 when the railroads were laid down, flung beams across the lines to 

 overthrow the hissing, whirring trains which threatened to disturb 

 their prescriptive barbarism. They asked but to be left alone — to 

 be suffered to live as their forefathers lived — to be spared the 

 ingenuities, successes, vices, and virtues of the New World. But 

 modern civilization, like Thor's hammer, or Siegfried's magic sword 

 Balmung, will break down the last barriers raised by ignorance and 

 superstition. It will shed its light upon the wilds and* wastes of 

 Brittany, and compel their inhabitants in the course of years to 

 acknowledge its value and accept its benefits." 



There is not a little in the ethnological remarks made which I am 

 not prepared to homologate. I consider the Parallelitha and similar 

 erections had no connection with Druidism, that they were more 

 probably connected with the worship of Baal in some of its forms, 

 having their counterpart in the high places spoken of in the Jewish 

 Scriptures, while the Druids represented the worshippers of the 

 " groves." But referring thus to this in passing I gladly, and with 

 gratitude, avail myself of the topographical description. 



Ere we reach that stony region in travelling northwards from the 

 Landes of Gascony, we must pass across the peat bogs of Montoir 

 and the Grand Briere, near Savenay, in the department of the Loire 

 Inferieure. They occupy a considerable area of a vast desolate plain, 

 where a few lean sheep crop an insufficient food from the scanty 

 herbage, and whose sole product is turf. " This country," says 

 Jules Janin, " has no other harvest, no other wealth than its peat ; 

 neither fruit, nor flowers, nor corn, nor pastures, nor repose, nor 

 well-being ; the earth is wild, the sky one of iron. It is a region of 

 stagnant waters, pestiferous exhalations, decrepit men, famished 

 animals." 



