112 Description of the Landes of Acquitania. 
habited houses, and as many more which are allowed to fall to ruin, 
and which, with the abandoned vineyards, and the wide unculti- 
vated plains between it and the sea, give a strange picture of deso- 
lation to what was once a flourishing port and mart of commerce. 
From 1242 to 1483, this town was of little importance ; it was 
only when the Adour, in 1597, came to bathe the territory. of 
Plech, (Playe or Boucau ,) that it aggrandized and became opulent. 
In 1630, the harbour was still capable of receiving men-of-war, 
like the other towns: plains and hills of sand now separate it from 
the ocean. 
Cape Breton is situated on the right bank of a great rivulet, 
fed by the waters of the basin of Orx, about half a mile from 
the sea, from which it is separated: by downs mostly covered with 
vineyards. This town contained a monastery of ‘Templars, which 
was afterwards given over to the Knights of Malta by Jean 22d; 
and was allowed to crumble to ruins in the hands of these defend- 
ers of the faith. 
In 1302, Edward I. granted privileges of commerce to Cape 
Breton, similar to those possessed by Bayonne ; but in the present 
day these have been transferred to the latter town and Bordeaux 
alone. 
In 1736, a Monsieur Dupius found in the vicinity a number of 
cinerary urns, supposed to have been the remains of a temple erect- 
ed by pagan antiquity to Jupiter. 
In terminating this description, we see two general facts,—a 
tract of country constantly on the increase, though liable in some 
parts to the overwhelming motion of sand, —and a stubborn infertile 
soil, gradually becoming more and more fit for cultivation, its hills 
becoming more stable, its waters less changeable, and the dominion 
of man every day more strengthened. 
‘It is only very lately that assistance has been sought in the de- 
velopement of the history of man, from a study of his physical cha- 
racters ; and it will probably be a long time yet before the inves- 
tigation of the phenomena displayed in the formation of the earth’s 
crust, of the succession of plants and of animals, of the changes of 
climate, and the consequent dispersion of existing races, will assist . 
in unravelling the gradual subjugation of new territories by the 
human species. Yet without making them at all general, science 
is every day stumbling on isolated facts containing the principles of 
such changes. It is but a short time since we have been made ac- 
quainted with deposits, which have been produced by causes nei- 
ther violent nor irregular in their action, and that have all taken 
place in the bosom of the same fluid, whatever diversity there may 
have been in the habitation of the animals and vegetables whose 
remains they contain. At a still later period of the investigation, 
it has appeared probable, that these deposits are so much the older 
the more remote, and so much the newer, the nearer the basins in 
which they are observed, are to our present seas. 
From their immediate vicinity to a great nation, territories of 
