sound he makes in emerging from the waters can
be heard, and the forms of his steeds are visible." This is the popular
belief, adds Tacitus; "the truth is that nature ends there."[26]

In this mysterious land, between the forests that sheltered them from
the Romans and the grey sea washing with long waves the flat shores,
tribes had settled and multiplied which, contrary to the surmise of
Tacitus, had perhaps left the mild climate of Asia for this barren
country; and though they had at last made it their home, many of them
whose names alone figure in the Roman's book had not adopted it for
ever; their migrations were about to begin again.

This group of Teutonic peoples, with ramifications extending far towards
the pole was divided into two principal branches: the Germanic branch,
properly so called, which comprised the Goths, Angles, Saxons, the upper
and lower Germans, the Dutch, the Frisians, the Lombards, the Franks,
the Vandals, &c.; and the Scandinavian branch, settled farther north and
composed of the Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes. The same region which
Tacitus describes as bordering on the place "where nature ends," held
thus in his day tribes that would later have for their capitals, towns
founded long before by Celts: London, Vienna, Paris, and Milan.

Many hundred years before settling there, these men had already found
themselves in contact with the Celts, and, at the time the latter were
powerful in Europe, terrible wars had arisen between the two races. But
all the north-east, from the Elbe to the Vistula, continued
impenetrable; the Germanic tribes remained there intact, they united
with no others, and alone might have told if the sun's chariot was
really to be seen rising from the ocean, and splashing the sky with salt
sea foam. From this region were about to start the wild host destined to
conquer the isle of Britain, to change its name and rebaptize it in
blood.

Twice, during the first ten centuries of our era, the Teutonic race
hurled upon the civilised world its savage hordes of warriors, streams
of molten lava. The first invasion was vehement, especially in the fifth
century, and was principally composed of Germanic tribes, Angles,
Franks, Saxons, Burgundians, Vandals; the second exercised its greatest
ravages in the ninth century, at the time of Charlemagne's successors,
and proceeded mostly from the Scandinavian tribes, called Danish or
Norman by contemporary chroniclers.

From the third ce