Brittany (Fr. Bretagne), the great north-western peninsula of France, extending in triangular form into the sea, its base resting on Normandy, Maine, Anjou, and Poitou, its sides washed by the Channel and the Atlantic Ocean. In earlier times it formed, with the name of duchy, one of the provinces of France; now it forms the five departments of Finistère, Côtes-du-Nord, Morbihan, Ille-et-Vilaine, and Loire-Inférieure, with a total area of 13,130 sq. m., and a population (1886) of 3,136,400. Before the Revolution, this district fell into the nine dioceses of Rennes, Dol, Nantes, St Malo, and St Brieuc, Tréguier, Vannes, Quimper, and St Pol-de-Léon; of which the first five made up the two popular divisions, the names of which are still indeed in general use: Upper Brittany (Haute-Bretagne); the last four, Lower Brittany (Basse-Bretagne). Though the height of its mountains nowhere exceeds 1150 feet, their structure gives to the peninsula a wild and savage aspect. Clay-slate forms the centre of the country, and masses of granite rise in the north and the south. The climate is often foggy, and subject to violent storms of wind. Large tracts of land lie uncultivated; but in the well-watered valleys vegetation is luxuriant. The peculiar shut-in situation and the characteristics of soil and climate in Brittany, seem to have had a powerful effect on the character of its people. The Breton has generally a tinge of melancholy in his disposition; and often conceals, under a dull and indifferent exterior, a lively imagination and strong feelings. He is passionately attached to his country and his customs, and is strongly averse to change. A bold seaman and steady soldier, he is devoted in his loyalty to time-honoured authority in church and state, and is capable of extraordinary devotion and sacrifice of self for his ideal. His piety is profound, although simple and unaffected; his pride, serious and self-respectful, entirely free from that petty peevishness and uneasy watching for small slights which so often belittle the real dignity of the Celtic nature. The manners of the natives might be called rude but for their simplicity. The percentage of illiterate persons in Morbihan is 50; in Loire-Inférieure, Côtes-du-Nord, and Finistère it sinks to 40; in Ille-et-Vilaine it is as low as 30. Thus book-learning, so far as regards French books, has hardly yet reached more than a half of Brittany, and the Bretons would be ignorant and uncivilised indeed but for a quite extraordinary wealth of traditional song and story, that serves effectively all the purposes of a national culture. Perhaps nowhere in the world has folklore reached such a high development, and this not less in quality than in quantity; for no traditional stories come near the Breton folk-tales, no popular poetry the Breton folk-songs. It must not be forgotten that there has long existed a pretty abundant literature, at least in religious subjects, in the Breton language, and that even in our day many natives are capable of reading this who do not read, and need not even speak, French. No part of Europe contains so many megalithic monuments as Brittany. Within the province are more than six hundred dolmens, and more than eight hundred isolated menhirs, and these, moreover, the grandest examples in the world. The largest, at Locmariaquer in Morbihan, is 67 feet high and no less than 342 tons in weight. Cromlechs also are very common, some of rectangular form. The great alignments near Carnac, situated within a few miles of each other, are the most celebrated megalithic monuments in the world.
In ancient times, Brittany, under the name of Armorica, was the centre of the confederated Armorican tribes, who were of Celtic origin. Later it was known as Provincia Lugdunensis Tertia, but it never was more than nominally under Roman sway. Already entirely liberated in the 4th century, it became divided into several allied republican states, which afterwards passed into petty monarchies. The Franks called its turbulent and warlike population Breton; the Latin writers, since the 5th century, Britanni and Brittones; while the country was called Britannia Cismarina, also later Britannia Minor, to distinguish it from the island of Britannia across the Channel, and to mark the original identity in the populations of the two. Brittany became subject to the Franks in the reign of Charlemagne, and was handed over by Charles the Simple to the Northmen in the 10th century. After fierce struggles the Bretons at length acknowledged the suzerainty of the Norman dukes. Geoffroi, Count of Bretagne, in 992. The duchy of Brittany was incorporated with France in 1532 by Francis I., to whom it had come by marriage; and subsequently it shared in the general fortunes of the kingdom. Its local parlement at Rennes was of course merely its supreme court, which but rarely played a political rôle. At the outbreak of the Revolution all the towns, and even some of the larger communes as well as the coast villages, embraced the new ideas, but the country-people mostly followed the lead of their curés and landlords, and remained intensely loyal to the ancient royal house. Brittany accordingly became the arena of a long and bloody struggle against dominant republicanism, its Chouans almost rivalling the Vendéans in the heroic stubbornness of their opposition to the Revolution; but it must be remembered that the revolt against the new ideas was at no time general as it was in Vendée. It was still smouldering so late as 1832, when there was an outbreak of popular feeling in favour of the elder Bourbons. Brittany has given many great men to France: Abelard, Duguesclin, the Connétable de Richemont, Jacques Cartier, Michel Colomb, Dom Lobineau, Duclos, Surcouf, Broussais, Laënnec, Jules Dupré, Duguay-Trouin, Kératry, Maupertuis, Chateaubriand, Lamennais, Jules Simon, and Renan, not to mention countless seamen and admirals. See Daru, Histoire de Bretagne (3 vols. 1826); Le Saint, La Bretagne Ancienne et Moderne (2d ed. Limoges, 1879); Loth, L'Émigration Bretonne en Armorique (1883); Joanne, Bretagne (1884); and Dean Church's essay (1846), full of insight and sympathy, reprinted in the first volume of his Miscellanies (1888).
Language and Literature.—The Breton (Brezonek, Brezounek; Fr. Bas Breton), the ancient language of Brittany, still called sometimes Armorican, to distinguish it from insular Breton, is one of those small Celtic tongues which have continued to be spoken languages down to the present time. It forms, together with Welsh in Wales, the but recently extinct Cornish in Cornwall, and that language known from a number of inscriptions to have been the tongue spoken by the ancient Gai's, the Cymric or southern group of the Celtic languages. It is at the present day spoken chiefly in the department of Finistère and the western parts of Côtes-du-Nord, and in Morbihan, and is still, according to the careful calculations of M. Paul Sébillot (in La Revue d'Ethnographie for January 1886), the ordinary language of about 1,322,000 persons, of whom no fewer than 679,700 know that language alone. The paper referred to contains maps showing village by village the existing limits of Breton and French. M. Sébillot estimates that by the close of the present century there will be no more than 100,000 persons ignorant of French, without, however, the Breton ceasing to be the 'vernacula lingua' of almost all the actual Breton country. Breton has four dialects: that of Vannes (Vannetais), of Quimper (Cornouaillais), of Tréguier (Trécorrois or Trégorois), and of St Pol-de-Léon (Léonais), of which the last is the most important. The dialect of Léon is the purest of the four, although the narrowest in its geographical extent; while the Cornouaillais is the widest, and next to it the Vannetais. These dialects indeed follow very nearly the limits of the ancient dioceses. Breton is most closely allied to Cornish and next to Welsh, but it surpasses both these tongues in the refinement of its grammatical forms and words. Most competent scholars consider it as having been carried across the Channel from England in the settlement made in the 6th century. See Rhys, Lectures on Welsh Philology (2d ed. 1879), and Belloguet, Ethnogénie Gauloise (4 vols. 1858-75). The greatest service to the grammar and lexicography of the language has been done by Pater Gregoire of Rostrenen, Le Pelletier, and especially Le Gonidec (died 1838). The last wrote the best grammar (Paris, 1807; 3d ed. 1850), as well as an excellent lexicon (Angoulême, 1821; St Brieuc, 2 vols. 1847-50). Many valuable papers on questions of Breton philology have been contributed to the Revue Celtique, which was commenced by H. Gaidoz at Paris in 1870, by Gaidoz, Ad. Pictet, Dr Stokes, Professor Rhys, D'Arbois de Jubainville, Le Men, Sauv�, Luzel, and other scholars. At the present day Breton philology is brilliantly represented by two young scholars, Bretons both by birth and tongue: M. Loth, professor at Rennes, and M. Ernault, professor at Portiers. At the instigation of M. Loth, and mainly under his editorship, the Facult� des Lettres at Rennes has published since 1885 a review, Les Annales de Bretagne, devoted in great part to Breton philology. See also Whitley Stokes, Middle Breton Hours, with translation and glossary (Calcutta, 1876), and his Old Breton Glosses (Calcutta, 1879 and 1880; and reprinted in the 'Transactions of the [London] Philological Society' for 1886).
The Breton literature of the earliest period (since the 6th century) is grouped together with the Bardic literature of the British Isles. Many of the oldest and most famous of the bards (as Gweznou, Taliesin, Sulio) belonged perhaps to Brittany, and their strong and spirited poetry, partly of a patriotic and historical, partly an erotic character, may have had no small influence on the work of the French trouv�res of the succeeding centuries. We need only allude to the Arthurian cycle of legend, worked up with such poetic wealth and variety of form by the medieval poets. The chief monuments of old Breton are two miracle-plays, a prayer-book or 'Hours,' a dictionary, and the cartularies of two monasteries. Of the plays, the first is founded on the life of St Nonna or Nonita, and exists in a manuscript ascribed by Zeuss to the 14th century. It was chiefly from this source, together with the two cartularies of the monasteries at Rhedon and Landevin, alluded to above, that Zeuss drew the materials for the Armorican part of his famous Grammatica Celtica. It was published in 1837 under the title of Buhez Santez Nonn, but a much better edition was given by M. Ernault in vol. viii. of the Revue Celtique. The second play, the Burzud braz Jezuz, the great miracle or mystery of Jesus, was edited by Hensart de la Villemarqu� in 1865, with a translation. It should, however, be added that this mystery has since been shown to be a translation from the French. As in course of time the French speech and culture spread over the country, and became the more familiar form for literary expression, the Breton struck root all the deeper into the affections of the common people, by becoming the chosen medium alone for the expression of their homely proverb, song, and story. Although it gradually ceased to be used for formal literary composition, Breton continued for centuries to be the medium through which the manuals of piety supplied by the church reached the faithful. The primitive manner of life preserved the conditions necessary not only for the transmission, but the creation of the folk-tale and the ballad, and genuine examples of these have continued to be produced by the free working of the popular imagination almost down to our own time. The extraordinary wealth of Breton popular literature was first revealed to the world, although under a somewhat fictitious garb, by La Villemarqu�. His Barzaz Breiz (1839; Englished by Toni Taylor in 1865) professed to be the fruit of many years' collecting in every part of Lower Brittany, but unfortunately it cannot be accepted as a genuine undoctored product of the popular imagination in the proper and scientific sense. It consisted of gwerzion (plural of gwerz), heroic or mythological ballads, many of which are short, but some have as many as 600 verses; sonion (plural of sonn, or s�n), love and festive songs; and religious poems; and was accompanied with translations and notes, and the original airs noted in the sixth edition (1867), some of which had, however, been given already in the first edition. Other volumes of poetry in the Breton language were Luzel's Bepred Breizad ('always Breton'), consisting of original verse (Morlaix, 1865), and a fine collection under his editorship of genuine gwerzion or popular ballads chiefly in the dialect of Tr�guier, Gwerzion Breiz-Izel (2 vols. 1874). M. Luzel, who is one of the most intelligent no less than patriotic representatives of 'Bretagne bretonnante' now living, as well as one of the most profoundly learned and scientific folklorists of France, is at present preparing a great collection of sonion. The legends of Brittany were worked up with fine effect by Emile Souvestre in his Foyer Breton (1844), and to their rare literary charm we owe some of the finest passages in the pages of George Sand and Renan. Since the 16th century, as has already been said, the native clergy have used the Breton speech for the composition of religious plays and hymns, as well as sermons and books of edification and instruction. At the present day there still appear one or two almanacs in Breton, some of which, however, are bi-lingual; while the journals issued in Brittany publish from time to time articles in the native language, and at election times there is a plentiful crop of Breton placards and posters; but it cannot be said that the Breton is now a cultivated language other than accidentally. The weekly journal Feiz ha Breiz ('Faith and Brittany'), which had a predominantly religious character, died at Quimper after nineteen years' existence (26th April 1884). There yet waited in Upper Brittany an ample harvest of folklore, no less than song and story, for the most learned and indefatigable of its editors, M. Paul S�billot, the chief of whose collections are his Contes Populaires de la Haute-Bretagne (three series, 1880-82), Litt�rature Orale de la Haute-Bretagne (1881), Traditions et Superstitions de la Haute-Bretagne (2 vols. 1882), Contes de Terre et de Mer, L�g�ndes de la Haute-Bretagne (1885), and Coutumes Populaires de la Haute-Bretagne (1886). And from La Villemarqu�'s own ground, Lower Brittany, M. Luzel has given the world the rich gleanings of years in L�g�ndes Ch�r�tiennes de la Basse-Bretagne (2 vols. 1881) and Contes Populaires de la Basse-Bretagne (3 vols. 1887), two invaluable collections that have a place on the shelves of all folklorists everywhere. There is also a good collection of Breton proverbs, 'Lavarou-Koz,' by L. F. Sauv� (1878). See a fine paper by Henri Gaidoz on 'La Po�sie Bretonne pendant la guerre de 1870-71,' in the Revue des Deux Mondes for December 15, 1871; and for other books and papers the 'Bibliographie des Traditions et de la Litt�rature Populaire de la Bretagne,' by H. Gaidoz and Paul S�billot, in vol. v. of the Revue Celtique.
Echin-stars (Ophiuroidea), one of the classes of Echinodermata, including forms not far removed from starfishes (Asteroids), but differing markedly in the more centralised body, more sharply defined arms, and more active habit. Compared more fully with starfishes, the brittle-stars are more muscular and less limy; the arms do not contain digestive c�ca from the gut nor reproductive organs, and are supported by an axis of central limy bodies like vertebrae; the tube-feet are smaller, probably simply tactile, and locomotion is effected by the muscular wriggling of the arms; the groove so well seen on the ventral surface of the starfish arm is here closed in by limy plates; the alimentary canal is blind—that is, without anus; the entrances to the water-vascular system (madreporic plates) are ventral; and the larval form is quite different. The popular name 'brittle-star' refers to the extreme ease with which the arms break; another common name, 'sand-stars,' refers less happily to their occasional occurrence on the shore; the technical title Ophiuroid describes the snake-like coils of their 'arms.' The commonest British species are the Common Sand-star (Ophiura texturata), the Lesser Sand-star (O. albida), and the Common Brittle-star (Ophioeoma rosula). Another important genus is Euryale, to which the Basket-fish or Argus Starfish belongs. See ECHINODERMS, STARFISH.