The fifth century was remarkable for what may be called the dislocation of the peoples of Europe--the migrations of the Germans into the Roman Empire, and, mightiest movement of all, the irruption of the Huns under their terrible king Attila, the "Scourge of God." The mere sight of the hideous Asiatics filled men with horror. Never afoot, but ever on their ill-shaped but rapid steeds, to whose backs they seemed as if they were glued, and on which they lived well-nigh day and night, it seemed as if man and horse had grown into one being. Their large heads ill-matched their meagre bodies; their tawny faces with deep-set eyes and high, protruding cheek-bones made them resemble rough-cut figures in stone rather than human beings. The Goths regarded them as the offspring of spirits of the desert and of witches. These masses of Asiatic barbarism, which had burst into Europe, stayed for awhile in Hungary, but soon rolled towards the West, dislodging all the peoples with whom they came in contact. Marching to the Rhine, they drove the Burgundians from their settlements in the district of Worms, a land so rich in song and saga, and entered Gaul to found a new kingdom. But the doom of the Huns was at hand, for Aëtius the Roman general, and the last defender of the empire, defeated them, A.D. 451, in a truly gigantic battle on the Catalaunian Plain, in the Champagne country. The slaughter was so terrible that the saying went abroad that the river ran high with the blood of 300,000 men. But it was clear that the tottering empire could not defend itself against a whole world in commotion. The time had come when Rome was to leave the stage of history. The great German nation was forming. It would be tedious and profitless to mention all the German tribes beyond the Rhine and Danube, a well-nigh endless list of names, impossible to remember. Besides, the petty tribes and clans gradually formed alliances with each other for greater security, and, dropping their ancient names, took collective ones more familiar to our ears--Saxons, Franks, Thuringi, Burgundians, Alamanni, and Bavarians. Of these the Alamanni and the Burgundians are those from whom the Swiss are descended, and thus Switzerland, like England, has to look back to Germany as its ancestral home. The tall, fair-haired, true-hearted Alamanni for whom Caracalla had such an admiration that to be like them he wore a red wig, are said to have been descendants of the Semnones, who had migrated from Lusatia on the Spree (in Silesia) to the Main. The name Alamanni is generally held by the learned to be derived from _alah_, a temple-grove, and implies a combination of various tribes, "the people of the Divine grove." The Suevi, of whom the Semnones were the most conspicuous tribe, had a sacred grove in the district of the Spree, where they met for worship. In the fifth century we find the Alamanni occupying the district from the Main to the Black Forest, East Helvetia, and Alsatia as far as the Vosges.