judgment of cases involving human life. According to Strabo, they and
their fellow-countrymen held that souls and the universe were immortal,
but that fire and water would sometime prevail. Sacrifices were never
made, Strabo says, without the intervention of the Druids. Pomponius
Mela says that in his time (c. 44 A.D.), though the ancient savagery was
no more, and the Gauls abstained from human sacrifices, some traces of
their former practices still remained, notably in their habit of cutting
a portion of the flesh of those condemned to death after bringing them to
the altars. The Gauls, he says, in spite of their traces of barbarism,
had an eloquence of their own, and had the Druids as their teachers in
philosophy. These professed to know the size and form of the earth and
of the universe, the motions of the sky and stars, and the will of the
gods. He refers, as Caesar does, to their work in education, and says
that it was carried on in caves or in secluded groves. Mela speaks of
their doctrine of immortality, but says nothing as to the entry of souls
into other bodies. As a proof of this belief he speaks of the practice
of burning and burying with the dead things appropriate to the needs of
the living. Lucan, the Latin poet, in his _Pharsalia_, refers to the
seclusion of the Druids' groves and to their doctrine of immortality. The
Scholiasts' notes on this passage are after the manner of their kind, and
add very little to our knowledge. In Pliny's _Natural History_ (xvi,
249), however, we seem to be face to face with another, though perhaps a
distorted, tradition. Pliny was an indefatigable compiler, and appears
partly by reading, partly by personal observation, to have noticed phases
of Celtic religious practices which other writers had overlooked. In the
first place he calls attention to the veneration in which the Gauls held
the mistletoe and the tree on which it grew, provided that that tree was
the oak. Hence their predilection for oak groves and their requirement
of oak leaves for all religious rites. Pliny here remarks on the
consonance of this practice with the etymology of the name Druid as