ome with horror and dismay.

[Footnote 36: Cellarius has collected the opinions of the ancients
concerning the European and Asiatic Sarmatia; and M. D'Anville has
applied them to modern geography with the skill and accuracy which
always distinguish that excellent writer.]

[Footnote 37: Ammian. l. xvii. c. 12. The Sarmatian horses were
castrated to prevent the mischievous accidents which might happen from
the noisy and ungovernable passions of the males.]

[Footnote 38: Pausanius, l. i. p. 50,. edit. Kuhn. That inquisitive
traveller had carefully examined a Sarmatian cuirass, which was
preserved in the temple of Aesculapius at Athens.]

[Footnote 39: Aspicis et mitti sub adunco toxica ferro, Et telum causas
mortis habere duas. Ovid, ex Ponto, l. iv. ep. 7, ver. 7.----See in the
Recherches sur les Americains, tom. ii. p. 236--271, a very curious
dissertation on poisoned darts. The venom was commonly extracted from
the vegetable reign: but that employed by the Scythians appears to have
been drawn from the viper, and a mixture of human blood.]

The use of poisoned arms, which has been spread over both worlds, never
preserved a savage tribe from the arms of a disciplined enemy. The
tender Ovid, after a youth spent in the enjoyment of fame and luxury,
was condemned to a hopeless exile on the frozen banks of the Danube,
where he was exposed, almost without defence, to the fury of these
monsters of the desert, with whose stern spirits he feared that his
gentle shade might hereafter be confounded. In his pathetic, but
sometimes unmanly lamentations, [40] he describes in the most lively
colors the dress and manners, the arms and inroads, of the Getae and
Sarmatians, who were associated for the purposes of destruction; and
from the accounts of history there is some reason to believe that these
Sarmatians were the Jazygae, one of the most numerous and warlike tribes
of the nation. The allurements of plenty engaged them to seek a
permanent establishment on the frontiers of the empire. Soon after the
reign of Augustus, they obliged the Dacians, who subsisted by fishing on
the banks of the River Teyss or Tibiscus, to retire into the hilly
country, and to abandon to the victorious Sarmatians the fertile plains
of the Upper Hungary, which are bounded by the course of the Danube and
the semicircular enclosure of the Carpathian Mountains. [41] In this
advantageous position, they watched or suspended the moment of attack,
as they wer