POPULATION AND SOIL, CENSUS, 1888 469 MONEY, WEIGHTS, MEASURES 469 CENSUS OF 1888 470 ORDER AND DATES OF THE ENTRY OF THE TWENTY-TWO CANTONS INTO THE CONFEDERATION 471 APPENDIX 473 THE SWISS REPUBLIC. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION. The first inhabitants of Switzerland, according to tradition, were fugitives from Italy, who had been driven by the Gauls from the country where now flourish the cities of Genoa and Florence, and who, 600 B.C., found an asylum in the recesses and wilderness of the valleys above which the Rhine has its source. They were known as the Rhetians, from the name of their hero Rhetus; hence the country about the source of the Rhine, embracing the Grisons, is even now called by some, Rhetia. The Canton of Schwyz claims to have been peopled by the Cimbrians, who, leaving their original habitations in Sweden, Norway, and Friesland, conquered their way over the Rhine to the cities of the Gauls, in the country which is now France. The people of Gaul implored help from Rome; a strong army was sent against them, defeating and driving them into the Helvetian mountains. Another tradition says that they were a race of Gaulic Celts, whom some unknown accident had guided from the borders of the Rhine and Main to those of the Lake of Geneva, their collective name being Helvetians, after whom the country was named in Roman times. The first authentic mention we find of these people, as a nation, is by Julius Cæsar, who, in the first book of his “Commentaries,” related the war he waged with the Helvetians, who had made an irruption into Burgundy during his government in Gaul. He defeated them, and reduced the country to the obedience of the Romans, annexing it to that part of his government which was called Gallia Celtica. They lived in subjection to the Roman government till that empire fell. Among the new kingdoms and principalities that were raised out of the ruins was the kingdom of Burgundy, composed of a Vandal race from the Oder and the Vistula. Helvetia was overrun and made a part of this kingdom in the beginning of the fifth century (409 A.D.). Then followed irruptions of Alemanni, Ostrogoths, and Franks. The division of Switzerland into German- and French-speaking races is doubtless to be ascribed to these early settlements of different tribes from Germany and Gaul. In the sixth century (550 A.D.), the Franks having subjected the other two, all Helvetia was united to the crown of France. It was lost to the kings of France during the ninth century, under the weak reign of Charles the Fat. About the year 870 there sprang up again two new kingdoms of Burgundy, one called Cis-Jurana and the other Trans-Jurana; the first, at the end of fifty years, was merged in the latter.