The Zoologist— October, 1868-. 1387 



have never been called in questiou. I will therefore extract with full 

 unity the following passage from their introduction, or as they call it, 

 " prologue." 



" The navigator has shown his humanity by giving the pig and the 

 potato as lasting resources for the supply of food; the missionary has 

 laboured to substitute the blessings of Christianity for the impure and 

 homicidal rites of paganism ; but with comparatively few exceptions 

 of this kind, the intercourse of civilized man with the aborigines 

 has been a visitation of unmitigated evil, varying in its kind but 

 uniform in its tendency towards the annihilation of the feebler 

 race. A century or two were spent by the Portuguese in the exter- 

 mination of the Guanches, the aborigines of Teneriffe and Fuerte- 

 ventura. After a similar period of English occupation in Newfound- 

 land the last of the original race had ceased to exist in the island. 

 In the nineteenth century the work of aboriginal destruction, like 

 many other processes of civilized art, has been wonderfully expedited ; 

 and about thirty years have sufficed to blot out the existence of the 

 once numerous aboriginal race from the fertile soil of Tasmania. In 

 various parts of the globe the assassination of races is perpetrated, and 

 the fact causes far less emotion than is often exhibited when a minor 

 catastrophe has befallen an individual." — p. 3. 



It is inferred in the opening of this passage that the attempted intro- 

 duction of Christianity was a counteracting or beneficial influence ; let 

 it be so ; but it is nevertheless easy to show that this influence has not 

 always been exerted in the same direction. No sooner has a tract of 

 country become a colony of Britain than the original inhabitant has 

 been deprived of all his possessions, and was either exterminated or 

 driven back into the primaeval forest; but let me glance at the three 

 races especially noticed by the Aborigines Protection Society — races 

 of which not an individual remains; all — men, women and children — 

 have been slaughtered by the Caucasian: I shall be guilty of some 

 repetition, but that is inevitable. 



1. The Guanches. These people have so utterly disappeared and 

 have been so entirely forgotten that one has to search diligently 

 through the records of the past for evidence that they ever existed. 

 They inhabited several islands of the Atlantic, more particularly Fnerte- 

 ventura and Teneriffe. They were totally destroyed by the Portu- 

 guese, and the only trace of their having existed is to be found in 

 certain mummified bodies of older date than the discovery of these 

 islands by Europeans. 



