THE GUANCHES. 



543 



DOLICHOCEPHALIC SKULL. 



The skulls illustrated (Figs. 2, 3) are drawn from specimens in the 

 collection of tlie museum of Las Palmas. The first is a purely Iberian 

 type, belonging to one of the three or four great divisions of the human 

 race— those large groups or nationalities which had gradually formed 

 from out of tlie primordial and half-simian swarms that had preceded 

 tlicin. These Iberians inhabited the greater part of Avestern Europe in 

 an infinitely remote period, probably toward the termination of the last 

 glacial epoch, which some would place at 

 eighty to ninety thousand years ago. 

 These men lived and died among the gigan- 

 tic animals now extinct; among mammoths, 

 the giant elk of Iceland, the cave bear, and 

 so forth. In England and in most parts 

 of western Europe (except Germany, where 

 tliey never penetrated) the remains of this 

 race Iiave been found in what are termed 

 the long barrows^ as distinguished from the 

 round barrows, which belonged to the 

 round lieaded, a stronger race, who gradu- 

 ally eliminated the weaker. This long- 

 headed race are known asthe Iberian ; they 

 inhabited the Basque provinces, Spain, 



northern Africa, Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, and the Canary Islands, and 

 it is the same race who, by some yet unsolved problem, found their way 

 to Mexico. These Iberians, however, gradually gave way before the 

 stronger races — the Aryan, the Scandinavian, and the Ligurian — but 

 in these remote Canary Islands they lived on less molested, less influ- 

 enced by more dominant races, and hence have transmitted to a com- 

 paratively recent time their structural peculiarities. For this reason 

 the caves and places of sepulture, which the 

 Spanish discovered here in the early part of the 

 fifteenth century, still retained the remains of 

 the most ancient race known to us — still indi- 

 cated their modes of life, and brought down 

 the manners and habits of the Stone period to 

 within three hundred years of our time. 



A glance at the two skulls as drawn here will 

 show the difference between the two types of 

 skull. The first, it will be observed (an ancient 

 Guanche skull of the Iberian race), IS longbehind, 

 low in front, and has the jaw hardly at all advanced from a perpendicu- 

 lar line down from the eye-socket. This, in scientific parlance, is the 

 Dolichocephalic and orthognathic type — that is, long-headed and weak, 

 or slightly protruding chin. The other skull, it will be at once seen, is of 

 a ditterent type — rounder, bolder, with more frontal development, and 

 with the jaw coming well forward. This is called the Bi-achycephalic 



Fig. 3. 



miACHYCHEPHALIC SKULL. 



