53$ MAN: PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



nails in with their heads" ; lastly the Catalans, noisy and quarrel- 

 some, but brave, industrious, and enterprising, on the whole the 

 best element in this motley aggregate of unbalanced temperaments. 

 To the cold-blooded northerner the Spaniards often seem scarcely 

 sane, and about as trustworthy as caged wild beasts, a people who 

 had empire thrust upon them, but never understood the nature 

 of the trust. Stripped of nearly all foreign dominion (1898) and 

 thrown back upon themselves, they must either turn to the useful 

 business of life and devote their energies to the development of 

 their resourceful country, or else sever the ties by which the 

 various ethnical groups are held loosely together. 



In Italy the past and present relations, as elucidated especially 

 Ethnic Re ^ v Levi and Sergi, may be thus briefly stated, 

 lations in After the first Stone Age, of which there are fewer 



indications than might be expected, the whole land 

 was thickly settled by long-headed Mediterranean Ligurians from 

 Africa in Neolithic times. These were later joined by Pelasgians 

 of like type from Greece, and by Illyrians of doubtful affinity from 

 the Balkan Peninsula. Indeed K. Penka 1 , who has so many 

 paradoxical theories, makes the Illyrians the first inhabitants of 

 Italy, as shown by the striking resemblance of the terramara 

 culture of ^Emilia with that of the Venetian and Laibach pile- 

 dwellings. The recent finds in Bosnia also, besides the historically 

 proved (?) migration of the Siculi from Upper Italy to Sicily, and 

 their Illyrian origin, all point in the same direction. But the facts 



1 Zitr Paldoethnologie I\Iittel- it. Sudeuropas in Mitt. Wiener Anthrop. Ges. 

 1897, p. 18. It should here be noted that in his History of the Greek Langitagc 

 (1896) Dr Kretschmer connects the inscriptions of the Veneti in north Italy 

 and of the Messapians in the south with the Illyrian linguistic family, which 

 he regards as Aryan intermediate between the Greek and the Italic branches, 

 the present Albanian being a surviving member of it. In the same Illyrian 

 family Mr W. M. Lindsay would also include the "Old Sabellian" of Picenum, 

 "believed to be the oldest inscriptions on Italian soil. The manifest identity 

 of the name Aodatos and the word meititnon with the Illyrian names Avddra 

 and Meitiina is almost sufficient of itself to prove these inscriptions to be 

 Illyrian. Further the whole character of their language, with its Greek and 

 its Italic features, corresponds with what we know and what we can safely infer 

 about the Illyrian family of languages" (Academy, Oct. 24, 1896). A vista is 

 here opened up which is likely to lead to good results. 



