366 MEXICO, CENTEAL AMERICA, WEST INDIES. 



and two or three other indigenoias forms have disappeared, while the domestic 

 pig and dog, introduced from Europe with the roebuck, have reverted to the 

 wild state. In Cuba the canine species rapidly develops new varieties, from the 

 little " Havana " lap-dog to the huge bloodhound, till recently employed in captur- 

 ing runaway slaves. 



Most of the Cuban birds belong to the North American fauna, and only one 

 species of humming-bird is peculiar to the island. The reptiles also have immi- 

 grated from the neighbouring mainland, though it is remarkable that none of the 

 local snakes are poisonous. The natives are not a little proud of the fact, and 

 even assert that venomous species when introduced gradually lose their poison. 

 The bite of the scorpion also is said to cause only a slight irritation. Land 

 tortoises abound, and, as elsewhere in the Antilles, the molluscs, of which there 

 are several hundred species, are for the most part distinct from those of the 

 continent. One of the curiosities of the Cuban fauna is a " vegetating bee," 

 a species of polisfes, which grows a fungus of the clavaria genus. The pheno- 

 menon is analogous to that presented by the New Zealand caterpillar, sphœria 

 Rohevtsi. 



The fossil animals, such as the megalonj'x, elephants and hippopotami, found 

 in the miocène rocks of the United States, have also been discovered in the 

 Cuban formations of the same epoch. Hence the inference that at that time the 

 island was connected with the neighbouring mainland, and that the Gulf Stream 

 must have set in a different direction from its present course. 



Inhabitants. 



Cuba has certainly been inhabited from a very remote epoch. Diorite and 

 serpentine hatchets of the polished stone age have been found, especially in the 

 neighbourhood of Bayarao in the eastern province. Archaeologists have also 

 explored several of the caneijca, or heaps of human remains, occurring in various 

 districts. In 1849 Rodriguez-Ferrer picked up on a cay south of Puerto 

 Principe a human jawbone in a fossil state ; later he found in a burial-place 

 near Cape Muisi some native skulls with artificially-depressed foreheads. This 

 was a feature common to the human types represented on the Palenque monuments, 

 and both may possibly have belonged tq the same race. 



With the exception of the savage Guanataveis (Guanahatabibes) occupying 

 the western peninsula near Cape San Antonio, the native populations found in 

 the island by Columbus certainly spoke the same language as the Yucayos of the 

 Bahamas and the people of Haiti and Jamaica. But the local names occurring 

 in Espafiola (San Domingo) were partly of Arowak origin ; hence it was con- 

 cluded that the inhabitants of the Great Antilles were mostly Arowak immigrants 

 from South America, where they still occupy the Essequibo and Surinam valleys 

 as well as the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta uplands. 



On the other hand, when Grij;dva first coasted Yucatan he was accompanied 

 by Cuban interpreters who conversed freely with tlie natives, so that, if not of the 



