CAUCASIAN VARIETY. 299 



their language. The Spaniards, who conquered tliem, repre- 

 sent them as a people of strength and courage, of powerful 

 bodies and intelligent minds, advanced in social institutions, 

 and of pure morals. They made the bravest resistance to 

 their European invaders, who did not completely subject 

 them until after a hundred and fifty years of repeated con- 

 tests. They had a tradition of their descent from an an- 

 cient, great, and powerful people. 



We now know them, as we do the Egyptians, only by 

 their mummies *, the race being completely extinct. The 

 entire head, engraved in Blumenbach's fifth decade t> 

 offers no essential difference from the European form. 



The testimony of Cuvier is to the same effect. " I 

 present to the Academy the head of a Guanche ; a speci- 

 men of that race which inhabited the Canaries before they 

 were conquered by the Spaniards. Some authors, believ- 

 ing the tales of Timaeus concerning the Atlantis, have re- 

 garded the Guanches as the wreck of the supposed Atlan- 

 tic people. Their practice of preserving dead bodies in 

 the mummy form might rather lead us to suspect some 

 affinity to the ancient Egyptians J. However that may be, 



* The body of Avhich Blumenbach's engraving exhibits a head, appears 

 to him to be that of a female. "When brought from its su'oterranean abode 

 on the island of TenerifFe to London, it was entirely and curiously sewed up 

 in goat skins, according to the usual practice of this ancient aboriginal race. 

 (See ViERA Noticias de las Islas de Canaria ; Glass's History of the Ca- 

 nary Islands; GoLBERY, Voyage en Jfrique; i. p. 88 — 95.) It was sur- 

 prisingly dry, and perfectly inodorous, although the muscles and skin, the 

 contents of the head, thorax, and abdomen, in short, all the soft parts, had 

 been preserved. So powerful had the process of exsiccation been, that the 

 entire body weighed only seven pounds and a half; although a female skele" 

 ton of the same stature, in its ordinary state of dryness, would weigh at least 

 nine pounds," Dec. .5. p. 7. 



+ No. xlii. 



+ Although the Gaunches were separated from the Egyptians by the entire 

 breadth of northern Africa, they not only resembled them in the singular 

 practice of preserving the dead, which was entrusted in both cases to the 

 priests, and in some of the ornaments bestowed on the mummies, but also in 

 language. From a vocabulary of the Tuariks, near Egypt, collected by 



