. Annual report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution. Smithsonian Institution; Smithsonian Institution. Archives; Discoveries in science. THE GUANCHES. 545 bly millions, of years they fiually exterminate, and we must watch them gradually improving in such rude arts of fashioniug stone as we know them to have possessed. Then the next stride would have been by making- their cave homes, employing still better implements of stone, polishing basalt, and shaping many things Avhich indicate both skill and imagination in their design, and so on, until they begin to adopt l)astoral ha
. Annual report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution. Smithsonian Institution; Smithsonian Institution. Archives; Discoveries in science. THE GUANCHES. 545 bly millions, of years they fiually exterminate, and we must watch them gradually improving in such rude arts of fashioniug stone as we know them to have possessed. Then the next stride would have been by making- their cave homes, employing still better implements of stone, polishing basalt, and shaping many things Avhich indicate both skill and imagination in their design, and so on, until they begin to adopt l)astoral habits, to breed flocks and herds, and with some gradually dawning ideas of what we term modesty, stitching the skins of their goats and sheep into garments. Thus slowly these islanders drift on, forming themselves into families, and-into village communities, and unconsciously evolving sonie patriarchal kind of government; take to having one wife, and one only; discover and enforce those main princi- ciplesof virtue to which even all our ('ivilization has added nothing, namely, courage, truth, and chastity. We must also picture to our- selves that in other i)arts of the world infinitely more rapid strides were being made; for whilst these ancient Canarians were only beginning to polish their basalt hatchets, the Etruscan and pre-llellenic races, the. Fig. 5. OUANCHE ML'MMY. Lignrians and our own Celtic ancestors, were already fashioning bronze; Homer's heroes were fighting, and were being buried at Hissarlik; and Avarriors, whose mythical names seem to have reached our day, were conquering still earlier races in our own islands. And still greater changes soon took place among more forward races in Europe and Asia. Iron was supplanting bronze; the mythical personages of pre-IIellenic days were giving way to historical men and women; civilization was rushing forward; the perfect gONernment of early Greece was forming itself; dynasties in Egypt were rising and falling; the Phwuician
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