THE GUANCHES. 



545 



bly millions, of years they fiually exterminate, and we must watch them 

 gradually improving in such rude arts of fashioniug stone as we know 

 them to have possessed. Then the next stride would have been by 

 making- their cave homes, employing still better implements of stone, 

 polishing basalt, and shaping many things Avhich indicate both skill 

 and imagination in their design, and so on, until they begin to adopt 

 l)astoral habits, to breed flocks and herds, and with some gradually 

 dawning ideas of what we term modesty, stitching the skins of their 

 goats and sheep into garments. Thus slowly these islanders drift on, 

 forming themselves into families, and- into village communities, and 

 unconsciously evolving sonie patriarchal kind of government; take to 

 having one wife, and one only; discover and enforce those main princi- 

 ciplesof virtue to which even all our ('ivilization has added nothing, 

 namely, courage, truth, and chastity. We must also picture to our- 

 selves that in other i)arts of the world infinitely more rapid strides were 

 being made; for whilst these ancient Canarians were only beginning to 

 polish their basalt hatchets, the Etruscan and pre-llellenic races, the 



Fig. 5. 



OUANCHE ML'MMY. 



Lignrians and our own Celtic ancestors, were already fashioning bronze; 

 Homer's heroes were fighting, and were being buried at Hissarlik; and 

 Avarriors, whose mythical names seem to have reached our day, were 

 conquering still earlier races in our own islands. And still greater 

 changes soon took place among more forward races in Europe and Asia. 

 Iron was supplanting bronze; the mythical personages of pre-IIellenic 

 days were giving way to historical men and women; civilization was 

 rushing forward; the perfect gONernment of early Greece was forming 

 itself; dynasties in Egypt were rising and falling; the Phwuicians 

 were peopling Spain, and driving out, or becoming identified with, the 

 Iberians of that land; and even the Celts in our islands were giving 

 way before the powerful red-haired, strong-jawed Scandinavians. But 

 here iu Canary things stood still. The people were a])parently per- 

 fectly content with their own mode of life, and lived on in their cave 

 dwellings, undisturbed by the strife and bloodshed which inevitably 

 accompany civilization. 



The sketches we give illustrate the rude stone implements used by 

 these people in excavating their cave homes, the very same caves that 

 SM 91 35 



