Phaeton's adventure sufficiently shows that everything has been boiled, even to the bottom of the sea. The sulphur of Mount Vesuvius incontrovertibly proves that the banks of the Rhine, the Danube, the Ganges, the Nile, and the Great Yellow River, are nothing but sulphur, nitre, and oil of guiacum, which only wait for the moment of explosion to reduce the earth to ashes, as it has already once been. The sand on which we walk is an evident proof that the universe has vitrified, and that our globe is nothing but a ball of glass--like our ideas. But if fire has changed our globe, water has produced still more wonderful revolutions. For it is plain that the sea, the tides of which in our latitudes rise eight feet, has produced the mountains, which are sixteen to seventeen thousand feet high. This is so true that some learned men, who never were in Switzerland, found a large vessel there, with all its rigging, petrified, either on Mount St. Gothard or at the bottom of a precipice--it is not positively known which; but it is quite certain that it was there. Therefore, men were originally fishes--Q.E.D. Coming down to antiquity less ancient let us speak of the times when most barbarous nations quitted their own countries to seek others which were not much better. It is true, if there be anything true in ancient history, that there were Gaulish robbers who went to plunder Rome in the time of Camillus. Other robbers from Gaul had, it is said, passed through Illyria to sell their services as murderers to other murderers in the neighborhood of Thrace: they bartered their blood for bread, and at length settled in Galatia. But who were these Gauls? Were they natives of Berry and Anjou? They were, doubtless, some of those Gauls whom the Romans called Cisalpine, and whom we call Transalpine--famishing mountaineers, inhabiting the Alps and the Apennines. The Gauls of the Seine and the Marne did not then know that Rome existed, and could not resolve to cross Mont Cenis, as was afterwards done by Hannibal, to steal the wardrobes of the Roman senators, whose only movables were a gown of bad grey cloth, decorated with a band, the color of bull's blood, two small knobs of ivory, or rather dog's bone, fixed to the arms of a wooden chair, and a piece of rancid bacon in their kitchens. The Gauls, who were dying of hunger, finding nothing to eat at home, went to try their fortune farther off; as the Romans afterwards did when they ravaged so many countries, and as the people of the North did at a later period when they destroyed the Roman Empire. And whence have we received our vague information respecting these emigrations? From some lines written at a venture by the Romans; for, as for the Celts, Welsh, or Gauls, whom some would have us believe to have been eloquent, neither they nor their bards could at that time read or write.