Rhenus

, one of the largest rivers of Europe, which divides Germany from Gaul. It rises in the Rhætian Alps, and falls into the German ocean. Virgil has called it bicorn is , because it divides itself into two streams. The river Rhine was a long time a barrier between the Romans and the Germans, and on that account its banks were covered with strong castles. Julius Cæsar was the first Roman who cro ed it to invade Germany. The waters of that river were held in great veneration, and were supposed by the ancient Germans to have some peculiar virtue, as they threw their children into it, either to try the fidelity of the mothers, or to brace and invigorate their limbs. If the child swam on the surface, the mother was acquitted of suspicion, but if it sunk to the bottom, its origin was deemed illegitimate. In modern geography the Rhine is known as dividing itself into four large branches; the Waal, Lech, I el, and the Rhine. That branch which still retains the name of Rhine loses itself in the sands above modern Leyden, and is afterwards no longer known by its ancient appellation, since the year 860, A.D., when inundations of the sea destroyed the regularity of its mouth. Ovid , Metamorphoses , bk. 2 , li. 258 .— Strabo , bk. 4 .— Mela , bk. 2 , ch. 3 ; bk. 5 , ch. 2 .— Cæsar , Gallic War , bk. 4 , ch. 10 .— Tacitus , Annals , bk. 2 , ch. 6 .— Virgil , Æneid , bk. 8 , li. 727 .――A small river of Italy, falling into the Po on the south, now Rheno . Silius Italic us , bk. 8 , li. 600 .— Pliny , bk. 3 , ch. 16 ; bk. 16 , ch. 36 .