"Besides these houses, which are those of the common people, and those of less importance, there are the chiefs' houses. They are built upon trees and thick arigues, with many rooms and comforts. They are well constructed of timber and planks, and are strong and large. They are furnished and supplied with all that is necessary, and are much finer and more substantial than the others. They are roofed, however, as are the others, with the palm-leaves called nipa." (Antonio de Morga, Sucesos.--Bl. and Rb., Vol. 16, pp. 117-118.) [63] "The edifices and houses of the natives of all these Filipinas Islands are built in a uniform manner, as are their settlements; for they always build them on the shores of the sea, between rivers and creeks. The natives generally gather in districts or settlements where they sow their rice, and possess their palm trees, nipa and banana groves, and other trees, and implements for their fishing and sailing." Ibid., p. 117.) [64] Especially in La Indolencia de los Filipinos, in "La Solidaridad," 1890, which develops the idea advanced by Sangcianco y Gozon. [65] "* * * As already seen, we must reject so often reiterated of late years that the early missionaries found nomadic or half-fixed clans and taught them the ways of village life. Village life there was already, to some extent, and it was upon this that the friars built. Doubtless they modified it greatly until in time it approached in most ways as closely to European village life as might be expected in tropical islands whose agricultural resources are not as yet well developed. From the first there would be a tendency to greater concentration about the churches, beginning with the rude structures of cane and thatch, which are replaced before 1700 in all the older settlements by edifices of stone, frequently massive and imposing, especially, so as they tower over the acres of bamboo huts about them, from the inmates of which have come the forced labor which built them. From the first, too, it was to the interest of the Spanish conquerors, lay and priestly, to improve the methods of communication between the communities which formed their centers of conversion or of exploration and collection of tribute. Yet to represent either the friars or the soldiers as great pathfinders and reconstructors of wilderness is the work of ignorance. When Legaspi's grandson, Juan de Salcedo, made his memorable marches through northern Luzon, bringing vast acres under the dominion of Spain with a mere handful of soldiers, he found the modern Bigan a settlement of several thousand people; his successors in the conquest of the Upper Kagayan Valley, one of the most backward portions of the archipelago to-day, reported a population of forty thousand in the region lying around the modern Tuguegarao, and so it was quite commonly everywhere on the seacoasts and on the largest rivers. Some very crude deductions have been made