Dr. José Rizal, greatest of all Filipinos, however, excelled all the rest. His is the first history from the Filipino view point (to be found in The Philippines a Century Hence, The Indolence of the Filipinos, and his annotations to Morga's History). His was the first systematic work by a Filipino in zoology, philology, and ethnology as aids to history; and as well his was the earliest Filipino interest in the Chinese records referring to these Islands. It was in 1887, in Dresden, Germany, that Rizal conferred with Dr. A. B. Meyer and Professor Blumentritt on the Chua Ju-Kua account of Manila in the middle of the thirteenth century which had just been translated by Dr. Friedrich Hirth, an extract from the work begun in 1885 and continuing over ten years. PRE-HISTORIC CIVILIZATION IN THE PHILIPPINES By Elsdon Best (Polynesian Society, Journal, Vol. 1) When a powerful and highly civilized nation comes in contact with a barbaric and isolated people, who have nevertheless advanced many steps on the road of progress, it would naturally be thought that the superior and conquering race would endeavor to collect and place on record information concerning such people: their manners, customs, language, religion, and traditions. Unfortunately, in the case of the Spanish conquests of the XVI century, that nation appears never to have considered it a duty to hand down to posterity any detailed description of the singularly interesting races they had vanquished. As it was with the Gaunches of the Canaries, the Aztecs of Mexico, and the Quichuas of Peru, so was it with the Chamorro of the Ladrones, and the Tagalog-Bisayan tribes of the Philippines. The same vandal spirit that prompted the conquistadores to destroy the Maya and Aztec literature also moved them to demolish the written records of the Philippine natives, and but few attempts were made to preserve relics or information concerning them. The Spanish priests, as the lettered men of those times, were the persons we should look to for such a work, but in their religious ardor they thought only of the subjugation and conversion of the natives, and so, with the sword in one hand and crucifix in the other, they marched through that fair land ignoring and destroying the evidences of a strange semi-civilization which should have been to them a study of the deepest interest. Fortunately, however, there were a few in that period who were interested in such matters, and who wrote accounts of the state of culture of the islanders of that early date. Some of these MSS. have been preserved in the archives of Manila and have lately attracted the attention of Spanish scholars.