They are worked in greenstone, mottled jade, green jasper, and a hard light green slate, mostly in wedge-form. But the most characteristic specimen of local art is an axe of coral rock, 7½ inches long, semi-cylindrical, and tapering at both ends, which was found in the cave of Cuevetas, twenty miles from Puerto del Principe, Cuba. [Illustration: FIG. 48.—Carib Shell-Knives.] The Carib aborigines of the Antilles furnish a striking example of what the more active manifestations of moral degradation among a savage people really imply. Compared with the gentle, passive Indians met by the Spaniards on the first islands visited by European explorers, the Caribs were a cruel and fierce race of cannibals, as hateful in all their most salient characteristics as the New Zealanders or Fijians. Yet time has proved, even under very unfavourable circumstances, that the fierceness and aggressive cruelty of the Caribs of the Lesser Antilles corresponded to the wild fury of the old viking rovers of Europe, and gave proof of energy and stamina capable of sturdy endurance; while the gentle and friendly Indians of the larger Antilles, without, in reality, any superior moral attributes, but only the characteristics of a weak and passive nature, have disappeared, leaving behind them scarcely a memorial of their existence. The Caribs are the historic race of the Antilles. Their chronicles derive vitality and endurance, like those of ancient Europe, from the vicissitudes of war. Those show them as restless aggressors; and though long since expelled from their ancient insular possessions, they still appear on the southern mainland as the people of an encroaching area; and the marches of their extending frontier ring with the shouts of border warfare, as fierce, and to us not greatly less substantial than the Wendish and Bulgarian warrings of Henry the Fowler, and his German Markgräfs of well-nigh a thousand years ago.