8o 



Transactions of the Canadian Institute. 



[Vol. Vir. 



INSCRIPTION XXVII. 



Perpendicular, like the last : 



A here aberabe be umerri : umerri kama lerrozarri rnopika : obeka 

 athedatu ari almena. 



Cattle tread under lambs : lambs shepherd place-in-order by twos : 

 better take away ram virilit)'. 



" Cattle tread under the lambs. The shepherd will place the lambs 

 two in a rank. It is preferable to deprive the rams of their virility." 



This last inscription is worthy of comparison with No. XXII., both 

 denoting, not onl\- the existence in Hierro of a pastoral Iberic popula- 

 tion, but also that of a population whose humble class of shepherds was 

 able to read such engraved notices. This seems to indicate that educa- 

 tion was general in the islands, or at least among the Iberians in them, 

 before the Christian era, and in the early Christian centuries. Can it be 

 that all their writing was confined to rock faces ; or had they, as Strabo 

 asserts regarding their congeners, the Turdetani of Spain, books and 

 parchment documents, containing, among other things, an account of 

 their eventful history ? Everything tends towards the suspicion that 

 they once had such memorials, which may not all have perished. 

 Librarians and similar custodians pay little attention to documents 

 which they cannot read, and can, therefore, neither class nor catalogue. 

 The question is worth asking, not only of archivists in the Catiar)- 

 Islands, but also of the same in Spain, southern France, Italy, and 

 north-western Africa, whether a little research may not bring to light 

 important historic facts concerning a race that has played no small role 

 on the stage of the past. 



