recalls Cimmerii or Cimmerians, the name of a people whom the Greeks
placed on the western bank of the Black Sea and in the Cimmerian
peninsula, called to this day Crimea. During these irregular and
successively repeated movements of wandering populations, it often
happened that tribes of different races met, made terms, united, and
finished by amalgamation under one name. All the peoples that
successively invaded Europe, Gauls, Kymrians, Germans, belonged at first,
in Asia, whence they came, to a common stern; the diversity of their
languages, traditions, and manners, great as it already was at the time
of their appearance in the West, was the work of time and of the diverse
circumstances in the midst of which they had lived; but there always
remained amongst them traces of a primitive affinity which allowed of
sudden and frequent comings, amidst their tumultuous dispersion.

The Kymrians, who crossed the Rhine and flung themselves into northern
Gaul towards the middle of the fourth century B.C., called themselves
Bolg, or Belg, or Belgians, a name which indeed is given to them by Roman
writers, and which has remained that of the country they first invaded.
They descended southwards, to the banks of the Seine and the Marne.
There they encountered the Kymrians of former invasions, who not only had
spread over the country comprised between the Seine and the Loire, to the
very heart of the peninsula bordered by the latter river, but had crossed
the sea, and occupied a portion of the large island opposite Gaul,
crowding back the Gauls, who had preceded them, upon Ireland and the
highlands of Scotland. It was from one of these tribes and its
chieftain, called Pryd or Prydain, Brit or Britain, that Great Britain
and Brittany in France received the name which they have kept.

Each of these races, far from forming a single people bound to the same
destiny and under the same chieftains, split into peoplets, more or less