Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/389

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OME little interest having again been awakened in the outside world concerning the West Indian Islands, the question is occasionally asked, Had those islands any aborigines when discovered by Europeans? If there were natives, do any of them remain? Both questions may be answered in the affirmative. The West Indies, or Antilles, consist of many hundreds, or even—reckoning keys or very small islands—several thousand islands varying in area from those which, like Cuba and Jamaica, number their square acres by the million, to the tiny key of half an acre or less. The greater number of these—indeed, all capable of supporting a population, with the exception of Barbados—contained inhabitants when first discovered. Barbados, though containing numerous evidences of former occupation, was uninhabited when taken possession of by its first European settlers, the English.

The peculiar interest attaching to the meeting between the European navigators and the Western barbarians is that—putting aside the discoveries of the Northmen in the tenth and eleventh centuries—it is the first meeting between modern and prehistoric man of which we have any account. Till the beginning of the nineteenth century the civilized world knew little or nothing of prehistoric man, and prehistoric anthropology was an unknown science. To have stated that man had existed on the earth more than four thousand years b. c. would have been regarded as heresy, and to have held that he had roamed over Europe when the mammoth crashed through its forests, and when the stately megaceros and reindeer browsed on its bogs, would have been considered the wildest folly. The stronger light that is being thrown on those times of long ago first shone in Denmark, where the study of runic stones and characters led to the disclosure of evidences of human occupation of that country far earlier than had ever heretofore been suspected. Subsequently, the finds at Abbeville, the discovery of the lake dwellings in Switzerland, the investigations in the caves of Kirkdale and Kent's Hole in England, with others too numerous to mention, awoke widespread interest in the newly arisen branch of investigation; learned men began to compare the remains and relics of the aborigines of America with those of Europe, and at length began to recognize that when Columbus landed on Guanahani, and was met by its painted and trembling inhabitants, the people of the Old World, instead of finding men of a new kind, were in reality standing face to face with men such as in Europe had been extinct for nigh two thousand years. This it