II.

It can never be satisfactorily ascertained who were the aboriginal inhabitants.  The record does not reach beyond Caesar’s epoch, and he found the territory on the left of the Rhine mainly tenanted by tribes of the Celtic family.  That large division of the Indo-European group which had already overspread many portions of Asia Minor, Greece, Germany, the British Islands, France, and Spain, had been long settled in Belgic Gaul, and constituted the bulk of its population.  Checked in its westward movement by the Atlantic, its current began to flow backwards towards its fountains, so that the Gallic portion of the Netherland population was derived from the original race in its earlier wanderings and from the later and refluent tide coming out of Celtic Gaul.  The modern appellation of the Walloons points to the affinity of their ancestors with the Gallic, Welsh, and Gaelic family.  The Belgae were in many respects a superior race to most of their blood-allies.  They were, according to Caesar’s testimony, the bravest of all the Celts.  This may be in part attributed to the presence of several German tribes, who, at this period had already forced their way across the Rhine, mingled their qualities with the Belgic material, and lent an additional mettle to the Celtic blood.  The heart of the country was thus inhabited by a Gallic race, but the frontiers had been taken possession of by Teutonic tribes.

When the Cimbri and their associates, about a century before our era, made their memorable onslaught upon Rome, the early inhabitants of the Rhine island of Batavia, who were probably Celts, joined in the expedition.  A recent and tremendous inundation had swept away their miserable homes, and even the trees of the forests, and had thus rendered them still more dissatisfied with their gloomy abodes.  The island was deserted of its population.  At about the same period a civil dissension among the Chatti—­a powerful German race within the Hercynian forest—­resulted in the expatriation of a portion of the people.  The exiles sought a new home in the empty Rhine island, called it “Bet-auw,” or “good-meadow,” and were themselves called, thenceforward, Batavi, or Batavians.

These Batavians, according to Tacitus, were the bravest of all the Germans.  The Chatti, of whom they formed a portion, were a pre-eminently warlike race.  “Others go to battle,” says the historian, “these go to war.”  Their bodies were more hardy, their minds more vigorous, than those of other tribes.  Their young men cut neither hair nor beard till they had slain an enemy.  On the field of battle, in the midst of carnage and plunder, they, for the first time, bared their faces.  The cowardly and sluggish, only, remained unshorn.  They wore an iron ring, too, or shackle upon their necks until they had performed the same achievement, a symbol which they then threw away, as the emblem of sloth.  The Batavians were ever spoken of by