. Annual report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution. Smithsonian Institution; Smithsonian Institution. Archives; Discoveries in science. 546 THE Fig. 6. PALiEOLlTHK" IMPLEMENTS. are still inhabited by the islanders of this day. They were held in one hand and nsed as we use a pick; but from the shape of one of these sketches it will easily be observed that a hamnuM'-shaped instrument was also used. These ail belong- to the Paleolithic age. They are gen- erally chipped roug'hly out of bine lias, weighing-4 or 5 pounds each. A larger kind weighed as nuich as 8 p
. Annual report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution. Smithsonian Institution; Smithsonian Institution. Archives; Discoveries in science. 546 THE Fig. 6. PALiEOLlTHK" IMPLEMENTS. are still inhabited by the islanders of this day. They were held in one hand and nsed as we use a pick; but from the shape of one of these sketches it will easily be observed that a hamnuM'-shaped instrument was also used. These ail belong- to the Paleolithic age. They are gen- erally chipped roug'hly out of bine lias, weighing-4 or 5 pounds each. A larger kind weighed as nuich as 8 pounds. (Fig-. (I.) The uext grou]) belong to the jSTeolithic age, and it would seem that in this age greater precision of work- manship Avas obtained in cave making, as is only natnral with improved in- struments. What interval of time elapsed between these periods is naturally merely conjectuie. These neolithic instru- ments are generally of lava or some hard trap. They were smaller, and many were of the ordinary spear and arrow head form found all over the world. (Fig. 7.) But now we come to a classic i)eriod in this Gnanche life. For though they remained untouched by what was going on in the world, the world itself already began to feel a deep interest in these " Fortunate Islands," especially the Greeks and Pha>nicians, to whose influence it is not to be Tdoubted the islanders owed some advance in their ceramic art, and possibly imi^rovements in their mode of life. For these were the islands of the Hesperides, and the peak of Tenerifife was the Atlas that bore up the heavens; and to these very islands Homer made Ju])iter send Menelaus as a reward for all his wrongs and all that he had sul^ fered. They were the Elysian Fields, "those blessed isles where the bitterness of winter is unknown, and where the M'inds of the ocean forever freshen the balmy ; This, too, is the home of Plato's vanished Atlantis, his ideal re- ])ublic. It thus becomes a stran
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