But all had not been said, and it still remained to be discovered of
what use the empty spaces in the rows could have been. "Let us look for
the reason, a thing nobody has ever thought of before," cried M. Mahé,
and, quoting a sentence from Pomponius Mela: "The Druids teach the
nobility many things and instruct them secretly in caves and forests;"
and this one from Tucain: "You dwell in tall forests," he reached the
conclusion that the Druids not only officiated at the sanctuaries, but
that they also lived and taught in them. "So the monument of Carnac
being a sanctuary, like the Gallic forests," (O power of induction! where
are you leading Father Mahé, canon of Vannes and correspondent of the
Academy of Agriculture at Poitiers?), there is reason to believe that
the intervals, which break up the rows of stones, held rows of houses
where the Druids lived with their families and numerous pupils, and
where the heads of the nation, who, on state days, betook themselves to
the sanctuary, found comfortable lodgings. Good old Druids! Excellent
ecclesiastics! How they have been calumnied! They lived there so
righteously with their families and numerous pupils, and even were
amiable enough to prepare lodgings for the principals of the nation!

But at last came a man imbued with the genius of ancient things and
disdainful of trodden paths. He was able to recognize the rests of a
Roman camp, and, strangely enough, the rests of one of the camps of
Cæsar, who had had these stones upreared only to serve as support for
the tents of his soldiers and prevent them from being blown away by the
wind. What gales there must have been in those days, on the coasts of
Armorica!

The honest writer who, to the glory of the great Julius, discovered this
sublime precaution, (thus returning to Cæsar that which never belonged
to Cæsar), was a former pupil of l'École Polytechnique, an engineer, a