This story, after exciting the smiles of the learned for about two thousand years, fell, in an evil hour for the peace of mind of modern philologers, into the hands of John Goropius Becan, a man of letters at Antwerp, who, recollecting that _bec_ has a like signification in Dutch, (_bec_ in that language meaning bread, and _becker_, as in our own, a baker,) immediately jumped to the conclusion, that Dutch must have been the language of the Phrygians, and that the Dutch were consequently the most ancient of mankind. This insane proposition he puts forward as the sole foundation of his two great folios, entitled, "_Origines Antwerpianae, sive Cimmeriorum Beceselana_," printed at Antwerp in 1569, in which he derives all the nations of antiquity from the Dutch, and makes all the names of gods, demigods, heroes, and places of the Old World, to have their only proper and characteristic signification in that language. The grave precision with which he lays the first and only foundation-stone of this monstrous superstructure, is sufficiently entertaining. "The Phrygians spoke the Scythic (_i. e._ the High-Dutch) tongue; and the Egyptians allowed the Phrygian language to be the primitive one. For when their king had ascertained that bec was a word of the original language of mankind, and could not understand it, he was informed that, among the Phrygians, it signified bread; whereupon he adjudged that language to be of all others the first in which _bec_ hath that meaning; which _bec_ being, at this day, our word for bread, and _becker_ ("baker") for bread-maker, it stands, consequently, confessed, on this most ancient testimony of Psammetichus, that our language is, of all others, the first and oldest." From so extravagant a commencement, nothing but the most fantastical results could be expected, and the reader will not be surprised to find Goropius making Adam and Eve a Dutchman and a Dutchwoman, as one of the very first corollaries from his fundamental proposition; the Patriarchs follow; then the Gentile gods, goddesses, and heroes; the Titans, the Cyclops, the pigmies, griffins, and "Gorgons, and hydras, and chimeras dire,"--