TENERIFE 
33 
The best account of the phenomenon that I have seen is in Glaisher’s trans¬ 
lation of Flammarion’s “ The Atmosphere; ” but there is some confusion in the 
description of the order of the colours. 
NOTE ON GUANCHE SKULLS. 
A young Swedish doctor, demonstrator of Anatomy in the University of Uppsala, 
effected an entrance into a cave on the face of a cliff, which had served the 
Aborigines as a burial place. From this cave, which I revisited with him the nest 
day, he removed about twenty-five skulls, which we carefully examined. Some¬ 
thing like two-thirds of them afforded indubitable evidence that their owners had 
suffered from depressed fractures which had healed during life. Surely it is very 
remarkable that such a large proportion should have gone through such an 
ordeal. [The exact numbers I forget, but am confident that the proportion is not 
exaggerated.] It so happens, however, that the Jesuit history of the conquest 
of the Canaries, states that the fair-haired inhabitants of the Western Isles had a 
strange pastime. They would go out, it is said, in opposing armies, and have 
mimic (?) combats, hurling stones at one another! 
It is probable that the cave in which these skulls were found had not been 
disturbed by man for centuries. From its roof, across the entrance, hung a veil 
of Maidenhair, Adiantum (?) capillus-veneris whose fronds measured a full yard. 
ENTOMOLOGICAL NOTES. 1 
Mr. Jenner’s statement that “ partial migration . . . explains the occasional 
presence of great numbers (of insects) on the sea coast, as every movement in that 
direction is stopped, and the species becomes as it were heaped up there,” was 
curiously illustrated by an occurrence that I witnessed in April, in the island of 
Tenerife. Behind the town of Santa Cruz, towards Taganana, stands a range of 
mountains with a strangely sharp crest. Near the summit the southern slopes are 
carpeted with a small Bugloss ( Echium sp.) with brilliant purple flowers; on the 
north side of the ridge the ground falls suddenly away in precipitous crags, densely 
wooded with Laurels and Laurustinus trees, under the shade of which is the most 
exquisite fernery ever imagined. A strong wind was blowing from the north, which 
struck against the cliff, and was turned upwards by it; a large number of white 
butterflies, Pieris daplidice , I think, impelled either by curiosity, a love of 
adventure, or of the beautiful, or what-not, kept flitting up these purple mountain- 
meadows, and making for the wooded crags. Each as it reached the edge, all 
unsuspecting, was cruelly swept up into the air, to a height of thirty feet or more; 
after a brief struggle it succumbed to force majeure , came down again and patiently 
began anew the ascent of the slope. Here the “ heaping up ” was literally effected; 
P. daplidice , though common throughout the island, was nowhere so abundant as 
on this spot. 
On a rubbish-heap outside the town of Puerto Cruz, and also in a stubble-field 
(cf. Stainton’s “Manual,” vol. i., pp. 143 and 150), I more than once observed the 
gently-fluttering, Grambus- like, flight of Deiopeia pulchella; on a tall, shrub-like 
spurge ( Euphorbia (?) piscatoria ) the grandly conspicuous larvae of Deilephila 
1 Entomologist's Monthly Magazine , 1887, Vol. xxiv., p. 158. The allusions are to 
communications from Messrs. Barrett and Jenner in the previous number. 
D 
