now that the dolmens are earlier. If they were so, it must be by centuries or by thousands of years, if we are to assume that the one had any influence on the other, for it must have taken long before a truly rude-stone monument could have grown into a constructive style like that of Sardinia or Malta; and I do not think, after what has been said above, any one would now contend for so remote an antiquity. If neither anterior nor coeval, the conclusion, if we admit any influence at all, seems inevitable that the dolmens must be subsequent. But this is just the point at issue. The nurhags did not grow out of dolmens, nor dolmens out of nurhags. They are separate and distinct creations, so far as we know, belonging to different races, and practically uninfluenced by one another. Here, as elsewhere, each group must be judged by itself, and stand on its own merits. If any direct influence can be shown to exist between any two groups, there is generally very little difficulty in arranging them in a sequence and seeing which is the oldest, but till such connection is established, all such attempts are futile.
In so far as any argument can now be got out of these insular monuments, it seems to take this form. If the dolmen people were earlier than the nurhag-builders, they certainly would have occupied the islands that lay in their path between France or Spain and Africa, and we should find traces of them there. If, on the contrary, the nurhag-builders were the earlier race, and colonised these islands so completely as to fill them before the age of the dolmen-builders, the latter, in passing from north to south, or vice versâ, could only have touched at the islands as emigrants or traders, and not as colonists, and consequently could have neither altered nor influenced to any great extent the more practically civilized people who had already occupied them.
So far as we can see, this is the view that most nearly meets the facts of the case at present known, and in this respect their negative evidence is both interesting and instructive, though, except when viewed in this light, the monuments of the Mediterranean islands have no real place in a work treating on rude-stone monuments.
