Scholars such as these on life-long service in their foreign homes were wont to make themselves conversant with every characteristic of the natives--with the language first of all, then the legends, poetry, chants; with the traditions and customs of the people, the industries and sports of their dusky-hued friends and brothers. As a rule, these plain, simply-told recitals of matters of fact, chronicle among other curios of literature, all kinds of even the most out-of-the-way learning anent the races of men; of plants and animals, of the various oftentimes most singular phenomena of air, earth, and water--subjects, all of them, of eagerest quest on the part of scientist, ethnologist, linguist, philosopher, naturalist. These stories, albeit at times verbose, at others digressive, will be acknowledged by the honest-minded critic as rich, indeed, in many-sided lore, enough to repay amply whatever time or trouble you have spent in their reading. With the exception of one collection of missionary annals--the Relations of the Jesuits in North America; now being edited by Reuben Gold Thwaites, Secretary of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin--I know of no exact counterpart in the field of English literature to these delightful narratives of old-time missionary travelers, Maver's translation of Zúñiga's Estadismo, in 1814, being not only out of print, but I suppose unpurchasable. With the aid of such monuments as these--all original records of old-time conquistadores and their fellow-missionaries in the Americas, it has resulted (to the delight and blessing of students) that the cyclopedias of Americana (thirty nine volumes of them), wherein you will find enshrined whatever is worthy of preservation in the various chequered cycles of aboriginal and Spanish polity and art, massed together by the Western historian Bancroft, are veritably invaluable to the antiquarian, besides being wholesome and refreshing food for men of intellective genius, as therein, along with abundant matter for romance and epic, you will see unraveled and laid bare many a drama of life. II. AUTHORITIES ON PHILIPPINE DIALECTS. Now a few words anent the chief authorities on Philippine linguistics--treatises, namely, bearing on the various dialects employed in that archipelago, twenty-seven in number, as observed ahead, all, however, akin in their common stock--Malay, of which these idioms, or patois, are daughters, yet with countless, sharply-marked differences between one another.