•4D0 THE PRE-HISTORIC RACES OF ITALY. 



bear of these Pelasgi in Greece as well as in Italy. Those inegalithic 

 structures which still excite our wonder — the walls of MyceniB and 

 Tiryns, as well as those of Cortona and Russelloe — are called Pelasgic. 

 Cjere and Cortona are said to have been Pelasgic cities prior to the 

 Etruscan conquest. We must therefore begin by asking who were 

 these Pelasgi. The modern doctrine, it is hardly needful to say, is that 

 the word has no ethnological significance, the name Pelasgic being 

 merely equivalent to " ancient" or " aboriginal." The term was a term 

 of ignorance, like the word "natives" now applied to Polynesians, 

 Patagonians, Red Indians, or Maoris. We may therefore leave the 

 Pelasgians out of account ; or rather, try and find out what races were 

 grouped together by ancient writers under this convenient but delusive 

 appellation. 



What we may call " the ethnological horizon " has wonderfully widened 

 of late years. For vast periods, for many millenniums, we are able to 

 trace the history of man in Europe. Ee is now proved to have been 

 the contemporary of the great extinct carnivora and pachyderms, and 

 to have followed northward tlie retreating ice sheet of the last glacial 

 epoch. The history of these primeval races has been traced by the 

 tools and weapons which they have left, and by the shape and charac- 

 ter of their skulls. 



Archa3ologists have distinguished the successive ages of stone, bronze, 

 and iron. The bronze age in Italy is believed to have commenced 

 some 4,000 years ago. The stone age, which preceded it, is divided 

 into two epochs, the Paliieolithic age, or age of chipped flints, and the 

 Neolithic age, when the flint implements were ground or polished. The 

 PaliBolithic people were utter savages, clad in skins, living in caves or 

 rock shelters, making use of no fixed sepulohers, subsisting on shell 

 fish or the products of the chase, ignorant of pottery, without bows 

 and arrows, and armed merely with spears, tipped with flint, horn, or 

 bone. 



Skulls which arc^ believed to be of Palaeolithic age have been found 

 in various parts of Italy — at Olmo, at Isola del Liri, at Mentone, and 

 in some Sicilian caves. They are all dolichocephalic, or long skulls. 

 Owing to the presence in their refuse heaps of human bones which 

 seem to have been broken in order to extract the marrow, it is believed 

 that these people occasionally practised cannibalism. But their chief 

 food seems to have consisted of wild horses of a small breed, which 

 then roamed over Europe in immense herds. Enormous refuse heaps, 

 consisting mainly of the bones of horses, have been found outside the 

 caves which were inhabited by this race. In the caves at the foot of 

 Monte Pellegriuo, near Palermo, the floor is formed by a magma of the 

 bones of wild horses^ wiiich were either stalked with spears, driven by 

 the hunters into pit-falls, or chased over the clitts. Similar deposits 

 have been found at the cave of Thiiyugen, in Switzerland, and-in front 

 of the rock shelter at Solutr^, near Macon, where there is a vast de- 



