The Breton "Cornwall" has been called by a popular French writer, "the Arabia Petrea of Brittany." But we might, perhaps, with greater justice apply to this sombre region, peopled as it is with fantastic visions, the name of "Land of Fear," which the Arabs bestow on the Great Desert. Less vivid, it may be, but graver and more profound is the impression produced by the Landes and Dunes of Gascony. These deserts of the south, which Michelet terms "the vestibule and threshold of the Ocean," appeal less powerfully to the imagination. They are haunted by no historical memories, no traditions or marvellous legends in which man has rudely embodied his dim conceptions of the mysteries of nature; they are crowded with no monuments of antiquity to revive the shadows of the heroes and priests of ancient Gaul; and when these are wanting, what shall supply their place? But ample scope exists for the assiduous labours of the naturalist, who here may see at work those unresting forces which have inspired every revolution of the globe's surface; who may contemplate here the phenomena that occur with the same regularity as in the days when man had not been fashioned after his Maker's image-- "Him framing like himself, all shining bright; A little living sun, son of the living light."[7] These despoiled plains, these inhospitable wilds, alternately dry and marshy; these sullen pools, these mountains of shifting sand, speak forcibly to his mind of their past history, which is not one of the least curious episodes of the history of the physical world. The department which borrows its name from the Landes of Gascony is divided by the Adour into two wholly dissimilar parts. [Illustration: THE SHEPHERDS OF THE LANDES.]