Here are the plains, often of considerable dimensions, which, bristling with rocks, and broken up by ravines, water-courses, and marshes, constitute the Landes of Brittany. True deserts these, relieved at distant points by an isolated hut, or by a wandering herd of swine, lean cows, and meagre-looking horses, which obtain a scanty subsistence from the heathery soil, sown here and there with tufts of furze, broom, and fern. Under a sky of almost continual sombreness, like that which impends over the pottery districts of England, these landes present a sufficiently sinister and uninviting aspect. The traveller, as he crosses their sepulchral wastes, will hardly marvel that they were anciently a chosen seat of Druidical worship. Like Dartmoor, they would seem to have offered a peculiarly fitting arena for the rites and ceremonies of a creed which we know to have been mysterious in character and sanguinary in spirit. They are covered with its gray memorials: the masses of granite of different shapes known as _Maen hirs_, or "long stones," and _peulvens_, which appear to have been employed as sepulchral monuments; _dolmens_, or "table-stones;" and _cromlechs_ (_crom_, bowed or bending, and _lech_, a stone), which antiquaries are now agreed to regard as the remains of the ancient cemeteries or burial places. At Camae, near Quiberon Bay, may be seen a truly remarkable example of the _Parallelitha_, or avenues of upright stones, forming five parallel rows, which extend for miles over the dreary moorland. What were their uses it is impossible to determine, for there seems little ground to believe, as some writers would have us believe, that they were "serpent temples," where the old Ophite worship was celebrated. We can only gaze at them in wonder: mile upon mile of gray lichen-stained stones, some twenty feet high, laboriously fashioned and raised in their present places by the hand of man some twenty centuries agone.[5] On these very _dolmens_, where the priests of the Tentates were wont to immolate their human victims to their unknown god, the mediæval sorcerers and sorceresses celebrated the Black Mass, or Mass of Satan, in terrible burlesque of the Roman Catholic sacrament, concocted their abominable philtres, and performed their dreary incantations. Alas for human nature! In every age it is a prey to the wildest credulity. Even in the present day more than one superstition hovers around the monuments of the Celtic epoch. The Bretons believe them haunted by demons called _poulpiquets_, who love to make sport of the passing stranger, but will sometimes give both counsel and encouragement to those who know how to address them in the prescribed formulas; who, like the Ladye in the "Lay of the Last Minstrel," at their bidding can bow "The viewless forms of air."