I wish by this example to recall those partisans into a little due consideration, who gift the ancients with such wonders in the way of generation, at the expense of the moderns. The canton of Berne alone, according to an accurate census, possesses a greater number of inhabitants than quitted the whole of Helvetia in the time of Cæsar. The human species is, therefore, doubled in Helvetia since that expedition. I likewise believe, that Germany, France, and England are much better peopled now than at that time; and for this reason: I adduce the vast clearance of forests, the number of great towns built and increased during the last eight hundred years, and the number of arts which have originated in proportion. This I regard as a sufficient answer to the brazen declamation, repeated every day in books, in which truth is sacrificed to sallies, and which are rendered useless by their abundant wit. "_L'Ami des Hommes_" says, that in the time of Cæsar fifty-two millions of men were assigned to Spain, which Strabo observes has always been badly peopled, owing to the interior being so deficient in water. Strabo is apparently right, and "_L'Ami des Hommes_" erroneous. But they scare us by asking what has become of the prodigious quantity of Huns, Alans, Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Vandals, and Lombards, who spread like a torrent over Europe in the fifth century. I distrust these multitudes, and suspect that twenty or thirty thousand ferocious animals, more or less, were sufficient to overwhelm with fright the whole Roman Empire, governed by a Pulcheria, by eunuchs, and by monks. It was enough for ten thousand barbarians to pass the Danube; for every parish rumor, or homily, to make them more numerous than the locusts in the plains of Egypt; and call them a scourge from God, in order to inspire penitence, and produce gifts of money to the convents. Fear seized all the inhabitants, and they fled in crowds. Behold precisely the fright which a wolf caused in the district of Gevanden in the year 1766. Mandarin the robber, at the head of fifty vagabonds, put an entire town under contribution. As soon as he entered at one gate, it was said at the other, that he brought with him four thousand men and artillery. If Attila, followed by fifty thousand hungry assassins, ravaged province after province, report would call them five hundred thousand. The millions of men who followed Xerxes, Cyrus, Tomyris, the thirty or forty-four millions of Egyptians, Thebes with her hundred gates--"_Et quicquid Grecia mendax audet in historia_"--resemble the five hundred thousand men of Attila, which company of pleasant travellers it would have been difficult to find on the journey. These Huns came from Siberia, and thence I conclude that they came in very small numbers. Siberia was certainly not more fertile than in our own days. I doubt whether in the reign of Tomyris a town existed equal to Tobolsk, or that these frightful deserts can feed a great number of inhabitants.