The swampy levels of Montoir form the natural vestibule to the Armorican Peninsula, which of all the French provinces has the longest and the most vigorously withstood the advance of civilization, its ideas, and its modern institutions, and has the most rigidly preserved its primitive character. There are many nooks and corners in Brittany scarcely changed in outward aspect or inner life since the remote days when it was a valued appanage of the English crown. They seem to have been plunged in a sleep of centuries, from which the shrill whistle of the steam-engine is only just awakening them. The country is undulating and broken; in the central districts it assumes quite a mountainous character. It is true that its heights are only of moderate elevation, the loftiest not exceeding 2000 feet; but they are barren, rude, and sombre in appearance. The coast is picturesque enough to delight the most zealous artist, bordered with high and abrupt cliffs, and lined, as it were, with a beach where the waters of the Channel ever break in floods of spray and foam, and where masses of rock lie scattered of immense size and the most fantastic forms. Geologically speaking, Brittany may be regarded as a prolongation of our English mountains, to which, like all the north-west coast of France, they were anciently united. In some remote era a vast convulsion opened in the solid land a chasm through which the oceans poured their meeting waters, and separated our beloved island from the European continent; the sole condition under which, perhaps, it was possible for the English people to have accomplished their destiny. Anchored amid the protecting seas, we are able to regard from afar, like a watchman from a tower, the convulsions that sweep across the face of Europe. Like the watchman, we cannot refuse to be moved by the spectacle, by the stir and the tumult; but it is only considerations of duty that can induce us to descend from our security, and mingle in the fray. Brittany belongs to what geologists call the primitive and intermediary formations. It is divided into three belts or longitudinal trenches: those of the north and south consist of primitive rocks, granite and porphyry; the central appertains to a more recent formation, to the group of intermediary or secondary rocks, composed in the main of schists and mica-schists, quartz, and gneiss. Schist prevails over a considerable area, and is prolonged to the very extremity of the peninsula. These hard, compact, impervious rocks, are entirely bare in many places; elsewhere, and over a great extent, they are covered but by a thin layer of clayey and sandy earth, where the sudden slopes of the soil do not allow the rains to settle.